“Aw, pore dear!  But there’s better tricks than dyin’ unwed.  Bind up my finger, Miss Ruby, an’ listen.  You shall play Don’t Care, an’ change your frock, an’ we’ll step down to th’ cove after dinner an’ there be heartless and fancy-free.  Lord! when the dance strikes up, to see you carryin’ off the other maids’ danglers an’ treating your own man like dirt!”

Ruby stood up, the water still running off her frock upon the slates, her moist eyes resting beyond the window on the midden-heap across the yard, as if she saw there the picture Mary Jane conjured up.

“No.  I won’t join their low frolic; an’ you ought to be above it.  I’ll pull my curtains an’ sit up-stairs all day, an’ you shall read to me.”

The other pulled a wry face.  This was not her idea of enjoyment.  She went back to the goose sad at heart, for Miss Ruby had a knack of enforcing her wishes.

Sure enough, soon after dinner was cleared away (a meal through which Ruby had sulked and Farmer Tresidder eaten heartily, talking with a full mouth about the rescue, and coarsely ignoring what he called his daughter’s “faddles"), the two girls retired to the chamber up-stairs; where the mistress was as good as her word, and pulled the dimity curtains before settling herself down in an easy-chair to listen to extracts from a polite novel as rendered aloud, under dire compulsion, by Mary Jane.

The rain had ceased by this, and the wind abated, though it still howled around the angle of the house and whipped a spray of the monthly-rose bush on the quarrels of the window, filling the pauses during which Mary Jane wrestled with a hard word.  Ruby herself had taught the girl this accomplishment—­rare enough at the time—­and Mary Jane handled it gingerly, beginning each sentence in a whisper, as if awed by her own intrepidity, and ending each in a kind of gratulatory cheer.  The work was of that class of epistolary fiction then in vogue, and the extract singularly well fitted to Ruby’s mood.

“My dearest Wil-hel-mina,” began Mary Jane, “racked with a hun-dred conflicting em-otions, I resume the nar-rative of those fa-tal moments which rapt me from your affec-tion-ate em-brace.  Suffer me to re—­to re-cap—­”

“Better spell it, Mary Jane.”

“To r.e., re—­c.a.p., cap, recap—­i.t, it, re—­capit—­Lor’! what a twister!—­u, recapitu—­l.a.t.e, late, re-cap-it-u-late the events de-tailed in my last letter, full stop—­there! if I han’t read that full stop out loud!  Lord Bel-field, though an ad-ept in all the arts of dis-sim-u-la-tion (and how of-ten do we not see these arts al-lied with un-scru-pu-lous pas-sions?), was un-able to sus-tain the gaze of my in-fu-ri-a-ted pa-pa, though he com-port-ed himself with suf-fic-ient p.h.l.e.g.m—­Lor’! what a funny word!”