Isaac was only three years old when Hannah remarried. Her second husband, a priest named Barnabas Smith, did not look kindly upon the little boy who watched him with a hostile gaze from behind his mother's skirts, and he convinced Hannah that it would be better for the little one to stay in Wulsthorpe and not with them. Thus, little Isaac was separated from his mother when she moved to another nearby town with her husband to start a new family with him. He grew up with the fog of loneliness increasingly tightening around his heart. Without a mother and without a father, only with the cold and taciturn grandmother, with whom he felt like a stranger, he remained for years indistinctly angry with people and disappointed in himself. The burden of that rejection, unbearable, filled him with so much sadness that it never faded from within him throughout his life.