“What’d I tell you?” she exclaimed before she had even unlatched the spring-lock.  “That young villyan has a head on him old enough to be his father’s, if so be he ever had one.  He’s deep as a well.  He didn’t tell his mother on ye yesterday mornin’, but he done worse—­the little fox!  He told his uncle Frank when he got home last night.  Leastways, Mr. Shaw got a message late in the evenin’ from upstairs, which was, to tell Mrs. Slawson, Mr. Ronald wanted to see her after his breakfast this mornin’, an’ be sure she didn’t forget.”

Mrs. Slawson received the news with a smile as of such actual welcome, that Eliza, who flattered herself she knew a thing or two about human nature, was rather upset in her calculations.

“You look like you relish bein’ bounced,” she observed tartly.

“Well, if I’m goin’ to get my walkin’-papers, I’d rather get ’em from Mr. Frank than from anybody else.  There’s never any great loss without some small gain.  At least, if Mr. Frank is dischargin’ me, he’s noticin’ I’m alive, an’ that’s somethin’ to be thankful for.”

“That’s as you look at it!” snapped Eliza.  “Mr. Frank is all right enough, but I must say I’d rather keep my place than have even him kick me out.  An’ you look as if his sendin’ for you was to say you’d come in for a fortune.”

“P’raps it is,” said Martha.  “You never can tell.”

“Well, if I was makin’ tracks for fortunes, I wouldn’t start in on Mr. Frank Ronald,” Eliza observed cuttingly.

“Which might be exackly where you’d slip up on it,” Martha returned with a bland smile.

And yet, in reality, she was by no means so composed as she appeared.  She felt as might one who, moved by a great purpose, had rashly usurped the prerogative of fate and set in motion mighty forces that, if they did not make for success, might easily make for disaster.  She had very definitely stuck her thumb into somebody else’s pie, and if her laudable intention was to draw forth a plum, not for herself but for the other, why, that was no proof that, in the end, she might not get smartly scorched for her pains.

When the summons to the dining-room actually came, Martha felt such an unsubstantiality in the region of her knee-joints, that for a moment she almost believed the bones had turned into breadcrumbs.  Then energetically she shook herself into shape, spurning her momentary weakness from her, with an almost visible gesture, and marched forward to meet what awaited her.

Shaw had removed the breakfast dishes from the table beside which “Lord Ronald” sat alone.  It was all very imposing, the place, the particular purpose for which she had been summoned, and which was, as yet, unrevealed to her, the person, most of all.

Martha thought that perhaps she had been a little hard on Cora, “the time she give her the tongue-lashin’ for stumblin’ over the first lines of her piece, that evenin’ of the Sund’-School ent’tainment.  It wasn’t so dead easy as a body might think, to stand up to a whole churchful o’ people, or even one person, when he was the kind that’s as good (or as bad) as a whole churchful.”