Fairfax considering the sorrows and early deaths of her parents,
charging them to her grandfather's account, and confirming herself in
her original judgment that he was a hard and cruel man.

The village of Kirkham was a sinuous wide street of homesteads and
cottages within gardens, and having a green open border to the road
where geese and pigs, cows and children, pastured indiscriminately. It
was the old order of things where one man was master. The gardens had,
for the most part, a fine show of fragrant flowers, the hedges were
neatly trimmed, the fruit trees were ripening abundantly. Of children,
fat and ruddy, clean and well clothed, there were many playing about,
for their mothers were gone to Norminster market, and there was no
school on Saturday. Bessie spoke to nobody, and nobody spoke to her.
Some of the children dropt her a curtsey, but the majority only stared
at her as a stranger. She felt, somehow, as if she would never be
anything else but a stranger here. When she had passed through the
village to the end of it, where the "Chequers," the forge, and the
wheelwright's shed stood, she came to a wide common. Looking across it,
she saw the river, and found her way home by the mill and the
harvest-fields.

It would have enhanced Bessie's pleasure, though not her happiness
perhaps, if she could have betaken herself to building castles in the
Woldshire air, but the moment she began to indulge in reverie her
thoughts flew to the Forest. No glamour of pride, enthusiasm, or any
sort of delightful hope mistified her imagination as to her real
indifference towards Abbotsmead. When she reached the garden she sat
down amongst the roses, and gazed at the beautiful old flower-woven
walls that she had admired yesterday, and felt like a visitor growing
weary of the place. Even while her bodily eyes were upon it, her mind's