She saw very few people; now and then she went with her father to a dinner-party where most of the guests were "grave and reverend seigniors" like himself; now and then to a dance, where people were civil to her, and where some stranger in the neighbourhood would occasionally show signs of incipient admiration, pleasantly exciting to a girl in her teens.

And now and then she had to receive visitors at home, feeling constrained and annoyed while she did so, by the invariable presence of George.

There were neighbours who would gladly have been good to her.

It was common for mothers to say to each other, "Poor Mary Wynter! I should like to ask here more, but I really dare not, Mr.Wynter is _so_ odd,"-- and Mary had even a certain consciousness of this goodwill and its suppression; but there were other sayings, common as household words, among these same people, of which she had no suspicion.

It would, perhaps, have changed the whole story of her life, if she had known that the reason why she lived as much apart from the whole region of lovemaking or flirtation as if she had been a staid matron of fifty, was, the general belief that she was engaged, and before long to be married to the one man in the world whom she cordially hated.