“If you must marry,” said the bailiff, “and it’s what girls like you seem to be always thinking about, you can’t do better than take up with Steph Whitelaw.  He’s a warm man, Nell, and a wife of his will never want a meal of victuals or a good gown to her back.  You’d better not waste your smiles and your civil words on a beggar like young Randall, who won’t have a home to take you to for these ten years to come—­not then, perhaps—­for there’s not much to be made by law in Malsham now-a-days.  And when his father dies—­supposing he’s accommodating enough to die in a reasonable time, which it’s ten to one he won’t be—­the young man will have his mother and sisters to keep upon the business very likely, and there’d be a nice look-out for you.  Now, if you marry my old friend Steph, he can make you a lady.”

This was a very long speech for Mr. Carley.  It was grumbled out in short spasmodic sentences between the slow whiffs of his pipe, as he sat by the fire in a little parlour off the hall, with his indefatigable daughter at work at a table near him.

“Stephen Whitelaw had need be a gentleman himself before he could make me a lady,” Nelly answered, laughing.  “I don’t think fine clothes can make gentlefolks; no, nor farming one’s own land, either, though that sounds well enough.  I am not in any hurry to leave you, father, and I’m not one of those girls who are always thinking of getting married; but come what may, depend upon it, I shall never marry Mr. Whitelaw.”

“Why not, pray?” the bailiff asked savagely.

Nelly shook out the shirt she had been repairing for her father, and then began to fold it, shaking her head resolutely at the same time.

“Because I detest him,” she said; “a mean, close, discontented creature, who can see no pleasure in life except money-making.  I hate the very sight of his pale pinched face, father, and the sound of his hard shrill voice.  If I had to choose between the workhouse and marrying Stephen Whitelaw, I’d choose the workhouse; yes, and scrub, and wash, and drudge, and toil there all my days, rather than be mistress of Wyncomb Farm.”

“Well, upon my word,” exclaimed the father, taking the pipe from his mouth, and staring aghast at his daughter in a stupor of indignant surprise, “you’re a pretty article; you’re a nice piece of goods for a man to bring up and waste his substance upon—­a piece of goods that will turn round upon one and refuse a man who farms his own land.  Mind, he hasn’t asked you yet, my lady; and never may, for aught I know.”

“I hope he never will, father,” Nelly answered quietly, unsubdued by this outburst of the bailiff’s.

“If he does, and you don’t snap at such a chance, you need never look for a sixpence from me; and you’d best make yourself scarce pretty soon into the bargain.  I’ll have no such trumpery about my house.”

“Very well, father; I daresay I can get my living somewhere else, without working much harder than I do here.”