“Did you wind up the stable-clock?” I put in.

“Yes.  I forgot it last night,” he said.  “And I hate to see a thing not working properly.”

Dear Banks!  I did not know, then, how characteristic that was of him.

I returned to the subject in hand.

“What do you propose to do, then?” I asked.  “To get their consent?”

“Just stick to it,” he said.

“You think they’ll give way?”

“They’ll have to, in the end,” he affirmed gravely, and continued in a colder voice that with him indicated a flash of temper.  “It’s just their respectability they care about, that’s all.  If they were fond of her, or she of them, it would be another thing altogether.  But she’s different to all the others, and they’ve never hit it off, she and them, among themselves.  Why, they treat her quite differently to the others; to Miss Olive, for instance.”

“Do they?” I said, in astonishment.  I had been romantically picturing Brenda as the favourite child, and I could not, at once, see her in this new light.

“She never got on with ’em, somehow,” Banks said.  “Anyway, not when they were alone.  Always rows of one sort or another.  They couldn’t understand her, of course, being so different to the others.”

I was not satisfied with this explanation, but I did not press him for further details.  His insistence on Brenda’s difference from the rest of the Jervaises was evidently as far as he could get.  The difference was obvious enough, certainly, but he would naturally exaggerate it.  He was, as Miss Tattersall had said, “infatuated,” but I put a more kindly construction on the description than she had done—­perhaps “enthralled” would have been a better word.

We had come to a pause.  His confidences were exhausted for the present.  He had told me all that it was necessary for me to know before I met Brenda and his sister; and I waited for him, now, to renew his invitation.  I preferred that he should re-open that subject; but he came to it rather obliquely.

“Well!” he remarked.  “Might as well be getting on, I suppose?”

I nodded and got out of the car.

“Can you find your way up?” he proceeded.

“Alone?” I asked.

“It’s only about half a mile,” he explained, “You can’t miss it.  You see, I want to get the car back to the house.  Don’t do it any good standing about here.  Besides, it wouldn’t do for them to think as I was holding it over them.”

Even the picture of a herculean Banks holding that car over the Jervaises failed to divert me, just then.  I was too much occupied with my new friend’s simple absence of tact.  I would sooner have faced a return to the Hall than an unsupported appearance at the Farm.

“Oh!  I’m not going up there alone,” I said.

Banks was honestly surprised.  “Why not?” he asked.  “You met Anne last night, didn’t you?  That’ll be all right.  You tell her I told you to come up. She’ll understand.”