For the rest, however, it troubled him but little; enough preoccupation did he find in Cynthia's daily increasing coldness.

Upon all the fine speeches that he made her she turned an idle ear, or if she replied at all it was but petulantly to interrupt them, to call him a man of great words and small deeds.

All that he did she found ill done, and told him of it.

His sober, godly garments of sombre hue afforded her the first weapon of scorn wherewith to wound him.

A crow, she dubbed him; a canting, psalm-chanting hypocrite; a Scripture-monger, and every other contumelious epithet of like import that she should call to mind.