Their aunt, their father's sister by the farmer's first marriage, a widow, took the charge of the house after her husband's death, when she had come to her old home at her father's bidding rather than at his invitation.
He had been angry with her for marrying a sailor, had prophesied from the first that no good could come of it, and he was more triumphant than sorry that his prophecy had proved true.
There are some people who feel a keen satisfaction when they are able to say with Peter Palmer of the Bishop's Farm, 'I told you so, and I knew how it would be.' Peter certainly repeated this often in the ears of his daughter, a stolid, heavy woman, whom it was difficult to rouse to any keen emotion, either of joy or sorrow.
Mrs Burrow was one of those slow people to whom stagnation is life. She could scarcely read, and her writing was so much like hieroglyphics that on the rare occasions when she had to sign her name she used to get one of her nieces to write, 'Dorothy Burrow, her mark,' and then she would add the cross.
She did not neglect the homely duties which devolved on her as head of her father's house. She managed the dairy and the poultry, and kept the farm servants up to the mark.
Her world was a wholly different world from that of her young nieces, and the imaginative and enthusiastic Bryda especially had nothing in common with her.
Biddy, who undertook the plain cooking and baking of the establishment, and had a light hand for pastry and cakes, and who mended the linen with unexampled neatness, was Mrs Burrow's favourite. She was useful, and had no new-fangled ways like Biddy, and would make a good wife when her turn came, but as to that flighty Biddy, the man who married her would repent it to his last hour.
'Do ask grandfather, Bet, to let me go to Mrs Lambert's.'
'I wonder you are in such a hurry to leave me,' was the reply.
'It's not you, it's this humdrum life. Here we live, with no books and no fun, day after day, month after month, year after year. Why, I shall be twenty at midsummer, and I have only been to Bristol twice, and to Wells once by the coach. Oh, Bet, I might as well be a turnip or—'