“Fie!” said Mrs. Dixon, without conviction.  She was fat and easy-tempered, and though ever anxious to conciliate him whom she respected and feared as “Mr. Eevans,” her powers of dissimulation often failed at a pinch of this kind.

Mr. Evans looked at his table-companion with a contempt to which she had long been resigned.  He was a short, thin, bald man, with a sharp nose curved like a reaping-hook, iron-grey whiskers and hair, and fierce pale blue eyes.  Later on, Christian, in the pride of her first introduction to Tennyson, had been inspired by his high shoulders and black tailed coat to entitle him “The many-wintered crow,” and the name was welcomed by her fellows, and registered in the repository of phrases and nicknames that exists in all well-regulated families.

“‘Fie!’” he repeated after Mrs. Dixon, witheringly.  “I declare before God, Mrs. Dixon, if I was to tell you the Pope o’ Rome was coming to dinner next Sunday, it’s all you’d say would be ‘Fie!’”

Mrs. Dixon received this supposition of catastrophe with annoying calm, and even reverted to Mr. Evans’ earlier statement in a manner that might have bewildered a less experienced disputant than he.

“Well, indeed, Mr. Eevans,” she said, appeasingly, “I’d say he was a nice child enough, and the very dead spit of the poor Colonel.  I dunno what harm he could do the children at all?”

The Prophet Samuel could scarcely have regarded Saul, when he offered those ill-fated apologies relative to King Agag, with a more sinister disfavour than did Evans view Mrs. Dixon.

“I’ll say one thing to you, Mrs. Dixon,” he said, moving to the door with that laborious shuffle that had inspired one of the hunted and suffering tribe of his pantry-boys to the ejaculation:  “I thank God, there’s more in his boots than what’s there room for!”—­“and I’ll say it once, and that’s enough!  As sure as God made little apples, trouble and disgrace will follow jumpers!”

Mrs. Dixon, no less than Evans, disapproved of those who changed their religion, but this denunciation did not seem to her to apply.

“That poor child’s no jumper!” she called after her antagonist; “’twasn’t his fault he was born the way he was!”

Evans slammed the door.

Mrs. Dixon dismissed the controversy from her easy mind, looked at the clock, and laid down her knitting.

“Miss Christian’ll be looking for her birthday cake!” she said to herself, hoisting her large person from her chair.  Even as she did so, there came a rapping, quick and urgent, at the window.  “Look at that now!” said Mrs. Dixon.  “I wouldn’t doubt that child to be wanting the world in her pocket before it was made!”

“Dixie!  Dixie!  Open the window!  Hurry!  I want you!”

Christian’s face, surmounted by a very old hunting-cap, and decorated with a corked moustache, appeared at the window.

“The Lord save us, child!  What have you done to yourself?  And what are you doing out there in the wet?” answered Mrs. Dixon, reprovingly; “sure the cake won’t be baked for ten minutes yet.”