‘Ay, she’ll be a good un yet if she takes arter thee,’ retorted the old man with a fierce sneer.

‘Drop it, and get away wi’ ye,’ cried she, ’or maybe I’d call Winny to smash your timber leg for you.’

‘A-ha! there’s more on’t.  She’s a sweet un.  Isn’t she?’ he replied sardonically.

‘You did not like it last Easter, when Winny broke it with a kick.’

‘’Twas a kick o’ a horse,’ he growled with a glance at me.

’’Twas no such thing—­’twas Winny did it—­and he laid on his back for a week while carpenter made him a new one.’  And Milly laughed hilariously.

‘I’ll fool no more wi’ ye, losing my time; I won’t; but mind ye, I’ll speak wi’ Silas.’  And going away he put his hand to his crumpled wide-awake, and said to me with a surly difference—­

’Good evening, Miss Ruthyn—­good evening, ma’am—­and ye’ll please remember, I did not mean nout to vex thee.’

And so he swaggered away, jerking and waddling over the sward, and was soon lost in the wood.

’It’s well he’s a little bit frightened—­I never saw him so angry, I think; he is awful mad.’

‘Perhaps he really is not aware how very rude he is,’ I suggested.

’I hate him.  We were twice as pleasant with poor Tom Driver—­he never meddled with any one, and was always in liquor; Old Gin was the name he went by.  But this brute—­I do hate him—­he comes from Wigan, I think, and he’s always spoiling sport—­and he whops Meg—­that’s Beauty, you know, and I don’t think she’d be half as bad only for him.  Listen to him whistlin’.’

‘I did hear whistling at some distance among the trees.’

‘I declare if he isn’t callin’ the dogs!  Climb up here, I tell ye,’ and we climbed up the slanting trunk of a great walnut tree, and strained our eyes in the direction from which we expected the onset of Pegtop’s vicious pack.

But it was a false alarm.

’Well, I don’t think he would do that, after all—­hardly; but he is a brute, sure!’

‘And that dark girl who would not let us through, is his daughter, is she?’

’Yes, that’s Meg—­Beauty, I christened her, when I called him Beast; but I call him Pegtop now, and she’s Beauty still, and that’s the way o’t.’

‘Come, sit down now, an’ make your picture,’ she resumed so soon as we had dismounted from our position of security.

’I’m afraid I’m hardly in the vein.  I don’t think I could draw a straight line.  My hand trembles.’

‘I wish you could, Maud,’ said Milly, with a look so wistful and entreating, that considering the excursion she had made for the pencils, I could not bear to disappoint her.

’Well, Milly, we must only try; and if we fail we can’t help it.  Sit you down beside me and I’ll tell you why I begin with one part and not another, and you’ll see how I make trees and the river, and—­yes, that pencil, it is hard and answers for the fine light lines; but we must begin at the beginning, and learn to copy drawings before we attempt real views like this.  And if you wish it, Milly, I’m resolved to teach you everything I know, which, after all, is not a great deal, and we shall have such fun making sketches of the same landscapes, and then comparing.’