“I hope Wyn is safe under shelter,’’ said Mrs. Moore.

“He will have reached the end of his journey long before this.  I hope he will have no trouble with the men, but he is not apt to.  I pity poor Mr. Robinson.  When Wyn chooses, his extreme politeness is something quite awful.”

“I will say for my husband,” observed Mrs. Moore, “that when he sets himself to work to be disagreeable, he can, without doing one uncourteous thing, be more aggravating than any one I ever saw in my life.”

“It is perfectly evident that he never tries his airs on you, or you would not speak so.  Hear the wind blow!”

“It is no use listening to the weather.  The house will stand, I suppose.  Have you got your work?  Then let me read to you.  It will seem like old times, before I was married.”

Minny Moore was in some respects a very remarkable woman.  Though little Carry was her first baby, she could talk on other subjects.  She did not expect you to listen with rapture to the tenth account of how baby had said “Da-da,” or thrill with agony over the tale of an attack of wind.  She had been her husband’s friend and companion before the baby was born:  she did not entirely throw him over now that it had come.  She had always been fond of reading, and she continued to keep up her interest in the world outside of her nursery.  She thought that as her daughter grew up her mother would be as valuable as a guide and friend if she did not wholly sink the educated woman in the nurse-maid and seamstress.  These habits may have been “unfeminine,” but they certainly made Mrs. Moore much more agreeable as a companion than if she had been able to talk of nothing but the baby’s clothes, teeth and ailments.

I took out my work, and Minny began to read Locksley Hall, which was then a new poem on this side the water.  I had never heard it before, and I must confess I was much affected—­more than I should be now.  Mrs. Moore, however, chose to say that she thought Amy had made a most fortunate escape, that she had no doubt but the hero would have been a most intolerable person to live with, and that their marriage, had it come to pass, would have ended in Amy’s taking in sewing to support both herself and her husband.  As for the Squire, why we had no word for his character but his disappointed rival’s, and his drinking might be all a slander.  As to his snoring, why poets might snore as well as other people.  If he loved his wife “somewhat better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse,” “Why what more,” said Mrs. Moore, “could any woman ask of a man given to horses and hunting?  If Calvin Bruce ever cares more for a woman than he does for his brown pointer and his fast trotter, she may think herself happy indeed.”

At that instant a sudden and furious blast rushed out of the woods, and tore and shook at the four corners of the house as if to wrench it from its foundations.

“It’s quite awful to hear the wind scream like that,” said Minny.  “It is like the banshee.  Hark! is not that some one knocking at the back door?”