An Open Verdict by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

MONDAY morning was bleak and cold. There was neither frost nor snow, but a driving rain that beat fiercely upon all the southern windows of the Water House, and obscured the view of river and village, church tower and moorland.

At nine o'clock Beatrix was still sleeping. Bella, to whom necessity had given the habit of early rising, was dressed and out of her room before eight, and found herself at a loss for occupation. There was a cheery fire in Miss Harefield's sitting-room, and the breakfast was laid -- a snug round table bright with pretty china and quaint old silver, with an old blue and red Oriental bowl of hothouse flowers in the centre. How different from the Scratchell table, with its tumbled week-old cloth, which was like an enlarged copy of Mercator's Chart of the World, done in tea and coffee -- its odds and ends of crockery, all cracked -- for what pottery that ever the potter moulded could withstand the destructiveness of the young Scratchells? -- the battered old Britannia teapot, stale quartern loaf, scanty remnant of salt butter, and inadequate dish of pale-faced rashers, the distribution of which half-cured pig gave rise to much ill-will and recrimination among Mr. Scratchell's olive branches!