Even for Cumbria it was a chill and sunless winter.  No bracing frosts, and persistent northwesterly winds.  Day after day the rain, which was snow on the heights, poured down.  Derwentwater and Bassenthwaite rose till they mingled in one vast lake.  The streams thundered from the fells; every road was a water-course.

Netta lost flesh and appetite.  She was a discontented and ailing woman, and the Dixons could not but notice her fragile state.  Mrs. Dixon thought her “nobbut a silly sort of body,” but would sometimes try to cook what pleased her, or let Anastasia use the kitchen fire for “gnocchi” or “risotto” or other queer messes; which, however, when they appeared, were generally more relished by the master than the mistress.

Dixon, perceiving no signs of any desire on Netta’s part to attend the “papish” chapel ten miles away, began to plot for her soul.  His own life was in the little Methodist chapel to which he walked four miles every Sunday, wet or fine.  In the summer he had accompanied the minister and one or two class leaders in a drive through the hayfields, shouting to the haymakers—­“We’re going to heaven!—­won’t you come with us!”—­and he had been known to spend five hours at a stretch on his knees wrestling for the salvation of a drunken friend, in the village of Threlkeld.  But Netta baffled him.  Sometimes he would come home from chapel, radiant, and would take her a bunch of holly for the table by way of getting into conversation with her.  “It was fine to-day, Missis!  There was three found peace.  And the congregation was grand!  There was four attorneys—­two of ’em from as far as Pengarth.”  And he would lend her tracts—­and even offer, good man, to borrow a “shandrey” from a neighbour, and drive her himself to the chapel service.  But Netta only smiled or yawned at him; and as for the tracts, she hid them under the few sofa cushions the house possessed.

Mr. Tyson, the agent, came to the house as seldom as he could, that he might not quarrel with his employer before it was to his own interest to do so.  Netta discovered that he pitied her; and once or twice, drawing on the arts of flirtation, with which the Florentine woman is always well acquainted, she complained to him of her loneliness and her husband’s unkindness.  But his north-country caution protected him from any sentimentalizing, however innocent.  And before the end of the winter Netta detested him.  Meanwhile she and Anastasia lived for one hope only.  From many indications it was plain that Melrose was going south in March.  The women were determined not to stay behind him.  But, instinctively, they never raised the subject, so as not to risk a struggle prematurely.