LITMIR.BIZ

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stain on the cloth in the event of a spill.

      Now Geoffrey’s eyes had been fixed upon his plate for the previous four or five minutes, and in removing them he had only carried them to the spoon, which, from its fulness and the distance of its transit, necessitated a steady watching through the whole of the route. Just as intently as the keeper’s eyes had been fixed on the spoon, Fancy’s had been fixed on her father’s, without premeditation or the slightest phase of furtiveness; but there they were fastened. This was the reason why:

      Dick was sitting next to her on the right side, and on the side of the table opposite to her father. Fancy had laid her right hand lightly down upon the table-cloth for an instant, and to her alarm Dick, after dropping his fork and brushing his forehead as a reason, flung down his own left hand, overlapping a third of Fancy’s with it, and keeping it there. So the innocent Fancy, instead of pulling her hand from the trap, settled her eyes on her father’s, to guard against his discovery of this perilous game of Dick’s. Dick finished his mouthful; Fancy finished her crumb, and nothing was done beyond watching Geoffrey’s eyes. Then the hands slid apart; Fancy’s going over six inches of cloth, Dick’s over one. Geoffrey’s eye had risen.

      “I said Fred Shiner is a nice solid feller,” he repeated, more emphatically.

      “He is; yes, he is,” stammered Dick; “but to me he is little more than a stranger.”

      “O, sure. Now I know en as well as any man can be known. And you know en very well too, don’t ye, Fancy?”

      Geoffrey put on a tone expressing that these words signified at present about one hundred times the amount of meaning they conveyed literally.

      Dick looked anxious.

      “Will you pass me some bread?” said Fancy in a flurry, the red of her face becoming slightly disordered, and looking as solicitous as a human being could look about a piece of bread.

      “Ay, that I will,” replied the unconscious Geoffrey. “Ay,” he continued, returning to the displaced idea, “we are likely to remain friendly wi’ Mr. Shiner if the wheels d’run smooth.”

      “An excellent thing — a very capital thing, as I should say,” the youth answered with exceeding relevance, considering that his thoughts, instead of following Geoffrey’s remark, were nestling at a distance of about two feet on his left the whole time.

      “A young woman’s face will turn the north wind, Master Richard: my heart if ‘twon’t.” Dick looked more anxious and was attentive in earnest at these words. “Yes; turn the north wind,” added Geoffrey after an impressive pause. “And though she’s one of my own flesh and blood . . . “

      “Will you fetch down a bit of raw-mil’ cheese from pantry-shelf?” Fancy interrupted, as if she were famishing.

      “Ay, that I will, chiel; chiel, says I, and Mr. Shiner only asking last Saturday night . . . cheese you said, Fancy?”

      Dick controlled his emotion at these mysterious allusions to Mr. Shiner — the better enabled to do so by perceiving that Fancy’s heart went not with her father’s — and spoke like a stranger to the affairs of the neighbourhood. “Yes, there’s a great deal to be said upon the power of maiden faces in settling your courses,” he ventured, as the keeper retreated for the cheese.

      “The conversation is taking a very strange turn: nothing that I have ever done warrants such things being said!” murmured Fancy with emphasis, just loud enough to reach Dick’s ears.

      “You think to yourself, ’twas to be,” cried Enoch from his distant corner, by way of filling up the vacancy caused by Geoffrey’s momentary absence. “And so you marry her, Master Dewy, and there’s an end o’t.”

      “Pray don’t say such things, Enoch,” came from Fancy severely, upon which Enoch relapsed into servitude.

      “If we be doomed to marry, we marry; if we be doomed to remain single, we do,” replied Dick.

      Geoffrey had by this time sat down again, and he now made his lips thin by severely straining them across his gums, and looked out of the window along the vista to the distant highway up Yalbury Hill. “That’s not the case with some folk,” he said at length, as if he read the words on a board at the further end of the vista.

      Fancy looked interested, and Dick said, “No?”

      “There’s that wife o’ mine. It was her doom to be nobody’s wife at all in the wide universe. But she made up her mind that she would, and did it twice over. Doom? Doom is nothing beside a elderly woman — quite a chiel in her hands!”

      A movement was now heard along the upstairs passage, and footsteps descending. The door at the foot of the stairs opened, and the second Mrs. Day appeared in view, looking fixedly at the table as she advanced towards it, with apparent obliviousness of the presence of any other human being than herself. In short, if the table had been the personages, and the persons the table, her glance would have been the most natural imaginable.

      She showed herself to possess an ordinary woman’s face, iron-grey hair, hardly any hips, and a great deal of cleanliness in a broad white apron-string, as it appeared upon the waist of her dark stuff dress.

      “People will run away with a story now, I suppose,” she began saying, “that Jane Day’s tablecloths are as poor and ragged as any union beggar’s!”

      Dick now perceived that the tablecloth was a little the worse for wear, and reflecting for a moment, concluded that ‘people’ in step-mother language probably meant himself. On lifting his eyes he found that Mrs. Day had vanished again upstairs, and presently returned with an armful of new damask-linen tablecloths, folded square and hard as boards by long compression. These she flounced down into a chair; then took one, shook it out from its folds, and spread it on the table by instalments, transferring the plates and dishes one by one from the old to the new cloth.

      “And I suppose they’ll say, too, that she ha’n’t a decent knife and fork in her house!”

      “I shouldn’t say any such ill-natured thing, I am sure —” began Dick. But Mrs. Day had vanished into the next room. Fancy appeared distressed.

      “Very strange woman, isn’t she?” said Geoffrey, quietly going on with his dinner. “But ’tis too late to attempt curing. My heart! ’tis so growed into her that ‘twould kill her to take it out. Ay, she’s very queer: you’d be amazed to see what valuable goods we’ve got stowed away upstairs.”

      Back again came Mrs. Day with a box of bright steel horn-handled knives, silver-plated forks, carver, and all complete. These were wiped of the preservative oil which coated them, and then a knife and fork were laid down to each individual with a bang, the carving knife and fork thrust into the meat dish, and the old ones they had hitherto used tossed away.

      Geoffrey placidly cut a slice with the new knife and fork, and asked Dick if he wanted any more.

      The table had been spread for the mixed midday meal of dinner and tea, which was common among frugal countryfolk. “The parishioners about here,” continued Mrs. Day, not looking at any living being, but snatching up the brown delf tea-things, “are the laziest, gossipest, poachest, jailest set of any ever I came among. And they’ll talk about my teapot and tea-things next, I suppose!” She vanished with the teapot, cups, and saucers, and reappeared with a tea-service in white china, and a packet wrapped in brown paper. This was removed, together with folds of tissue-paper underneath; and a brilliant silver teapot appeared.

      “I’ll help to put the things right,” said Fancy soothingly, and rising from her seat. “I ought to have laid out better things, I suppose. But” (here she enlarged her looks so as to include Dick) “I have been away from home a good deal, and I make shocking blunders in my housekeeping.” Smiles and suavity were then dispensed all around by this bright little bird.

      After a little more preparation and modification, Mrs. Day took her seat at the head of the table, and during the latter or tea division of the meal, presided with much composure. It may cause some surprise

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