avoid Fellfoot altogether, and leave the
Todyeares to manage their family affairs by
themselves as they liked. People do not like to be
made the confidants of suffering wives; and
when the question in dispute is marriage or
illegality they would rather not give their votes
at all, but let judgment go by default. As in
this case. Wherefore, when the father died, his
two daughters, who had been under a cloud all
their lives— unoffending as they were coming in
for at least reflected disesteem— had not an
acquaintance in the world, and were as much alone
as it they and their servants were the sole
inhabitants of a desert island.

Mr. Todyeare was a man whose wrong-doing
was rather insanity of temper than hardness of
heart; so that when his temper was no longer
crossed his conscience took the ascendant and
tormented him fiercely— his faculty of repentance
being as illimitable as his evil will had
been resolute. When his wife died and the
daily fret of her will in opposition to his own
was at an end, he fell into a deep melancholy,
which finally became a monomania of remorse
for the hard life he had led her, and the
injustice he had done her: not an active madness—
merely a morbid, quiet kind of insanity, which
gave an additional horror to the life and place;
but no danger. The world said it was a
judgment on him for his sins: so it was, but not in
the way they thought.

It would have been no wonder if the whole
family had gone raving mad, for Fellfoot was
the most melancholy place to be found within
the four seas. It was far away from any other
house, and stood in a craggy hollow surrounded
by woods. Woods and crags rose everywhere
and kept the air in the basin below as stagnant
as the water of a pond. The smoke rose straight
from the chimneys of Fellfoot, when, in the
villages beyond, houses were unroofed and forest
trees uprooted in the gale; and the autumn
leaves fell in quiet showers, like the pattering
of rain on the ground, when the winds,
elsewhere, stripped them with frantic fury from the
boughs. Sometimes, indeed, a whirlwind caught
the sides of the basin, eddying round and round
among the woods till the dead leaves were piled
up in thick drifts, where a man might be lost
standing upright: so with the snow: but in
general the air was still and dead, reeking with
the vapours from the woods, and oppressive with
the varied scents of vegetation; in autumn-time
unhealthy, and even in spring and summer
unrefreshing. The house was entirely hidden from
view, save at one certain point in the road
leading to it. It might have been burnt to the
ground, and no one would have seen a flame;
and every inmate in it might have been robbed
and murdered, and the busy world beyond would
not have heard a sound and might not have
known for days. For it stood away from the
main road, lost in this deep hollow, and the one
approach to it was by a steep and rugged road,
almost dangerous even with sure-footed horses;
consequently, the very tradespeople called at
Fellfoot as seldom as they could, and the
monotony of life was nearly unbroken. Nothing but
one eternal view — the same from every window
in the house, look where you would: nothing
but trees— trees; gold and green, and white with
blossom, and flushed with crimson veinings in
the spring-time, truly; and gorgeous with all
imaginable hues of scarlet and gold and russet
and darkening bronze in the autumn; else of
one uniform outline, of one eternal sameness.

To this inheritance, then, the two sisters,
Martha and Hester Todyeare, had succeeded.
The Todyeares were of German origin, and the
name had been Todtjahr in earlier times; but it
had got softened out of its former grim meaning
into what gave local etymologists, ignorant of
German, wide scope for wild derivations. They
still retained the German look, and both were
fair; but Martha, the elder, was a brown-haired
woman, and tall and strong and resolute, with a
square brow and a set jaw, yet kind and comely
too; a woman with something of the masculine
element in her, but not less than woman all the
same. Hester, shy and timid, and with all her
lines soft and flowing, was one of those golden-
headed seraph-women, made up of love and fear,
who get more cared for than the rest of the world,
because they have no fibre in them, no power of
resistance or of self-support or of will— very
sweet and lovely and feminine, but who live and
die mere girls to the last: people for whom
the strong invariably sacrifice themselves, or to
whom they are sacrificed.

There was a great difference in age between
them; Martha being ten years the elder, which
made her more mother than sister, for the
mother had not lived beyond the little one's first
childhood, and Martha had, therefore, taken her
entirely to herself. And as no governess was
allowed at Fellfoot, and no companions of their
own age ever invited, even if any could have
been found willing to come, it had been a very
entire taking to herself. And, as a consequence,
the whole force of the two natures, intensified by
the isolation of their lives, had concentrated into
one deep love for each other— Martha's the
maternal love of the stronger, and Hester's the
dependent love of the child, with that other faculty
of hers, her fear, reserved for her father. There
was no one else to love or fear, for they did not
know the only relatives they had, Faber and
Susan Todyeare (the Faber Todyeares as they
were generally called), the children of the
younger brother, but older than both these
sisters; Susan being older than Martha, and
Faber, the elder, almost old enough to be
Hester's father. There had been a coolness
between the two families ever since William
Todyeare, of Fellfoot, had married his housekeeper.

The funeral had taken place three days ago,
and the two sisters were sitting in the garden
together. It was in the hot and sultry summer
time, when the woods looked unfathomable, and
when the air was almost tropical with heat and
steaming vapours; it was one of those lowering
summer days when the angry temper of the
atmosphere seems to react on men, and to breed
angry tempers in the soul. Its only effect on