CHAPTER XXXIX.
A DOMESTIC MYSTERY.
It was near the end of March, but still bleak cold weather.

Ellen Carley had been married something less than a fortnight, and had come to look upon the dismal old farm-house by the river with a more accustomed eye than when Mrs.Tadman had taken her from room to room on a journey of inspection.

Not that the place seemed any less dreary and ugly to her to-day than it had seemed at the very first.

Familiarity could not make it pleasant.

She hated the house and everything about and around it, as she hated her husband, with a rooted aversion, not to be subdued by any endeavour which she might make now and then--and she did honestly make such endeavour--to arrive at a more Christian-like frame of mind.
Notwithstanding this deeply-seated instinctive dislike to all her surroundings, she endured her fate quietly, and did her duty with a patient spirit which might fairly be accepted as an atonement for those inward rebellious feelings which she could not conquer.