Tilda’s hopes were tottering, falling about her, she hardly knew how or why.  Vaguely she had been building up a fabric of hope that she was helping Arthur Miles home to a splendid inheritance.  Such things happened, almost as a matter of course, in the penny fiction to which her reading had been exclusively confined.  To be sure, they never happened—­they were wildly unlikely to happen—­in the world of her own limited experience.  But in the society to which the boy belonged by his gentle manners and his trick of speech, which could only come as a birthright—­in that rarefied world where the ladies wore low gowns, with diamonds around their necks, and the gentlemen dined in fine linen with wide shirt-fronts—­all life moved upon the machinery of romance.  The books said so; and after that romance she had been pursuing, by degrees more consciously, from fugitive hints almost to certainty that a few hours would give it into her grasp.  And now—­

“Is—­is he poor?” she repeated.  She could not understand it.  The story-books always conducted the long-lost heir to rank and wealth in the end.

“Well, he don’t spend money, they say,” answered Chrissy.  “But nobody knows for certain.  His tenants never see him.  He’s always abroad:  he’s abroad now—­”

“Abroad?”

This was worse and worse.

“Or else shut up at Meriton—­that’s the great house—­with a lot of nasty chemicals, trying to turn copper pennies into gold, they say.”

Tilda caught at this hope.

“P’r’aps ’e’ll manage it, one of these days.”

“That’s silly.  Folks have been trying it for hundreds of years, and it’ll never be done.”

“And ’Olmness?  ’As Miss Sally bought ’Olmness too?”

“No; he wouldn’t part with it, for some reason.  But father rents the grazing from him; same as before, when th’ island belonged to Inistow Farm.  There’s a tale—­”

But Tilda was not to hear the tale, for just now Mrs. Tossell pushed back her chair, and at her signal the feast ended.  All left the table, and exchanged their benches for the settle or for chairs which they drew in a wide semicircle around the fireplace.  Across the warm chord of this semicircle the sheep-dogs, stretched before the blaze, looked up lazily, and settled themselves to doze again.  ’Dolph, lying a little apart (for they declined to take notice of him), copied their movements in an ingratiating but not very successful attempt to appear bred to the manner.

Tilda remarked that the company took their new positions with some formality.  The shepherd alone comported himself carelessly, slouching around to the back of the fire, where he lit a clay pipe from the embers and seated himself on one of the ingle-ends, so that his tobacco smoke had a clear passage up the chimney.  Then, almost before the children knew what was happening, the Minister gave out a hymn.