His daughter and only child was afraid of him; his wife had been afraid of him in her time, and had faded slowly out of a life that had been very joyless, unawares, hiding her illness from him to the last, as if it had been a sort of offence against him to be ill.

It was only when she was dying that the bailiff knew he was going to lose her; and it must be confessed that he took the loss very calmly.
Whatever natural grief he may have felt was carefully locked in his own breast.

His underlings, the farm-labourers, found him a little more "grumpy" than usual, and his daughter scarcely dared open her lips to him for a month after the funeral.

But from that time forward Miss Carley, who was rather a spirited damsel, took a very different tone with her father.

She was not to be crushed and subdued into a mere submissive shadow, as her mother had been.