So things stood when Mary Cobley broke her sad tale to her son, while he sat and sucked his pipe and listened on a winter evening, with the wind puffing the peat smoke from the fire into the room off and again.

“’Tis like this,” she said.  “Farmer’s hard up, or so he says, and wants to sell Mrs. Pedlar’s cottage over her head.  But there’s one way out and only one.  Of course, Bewes be a lot too crafty to put it in words; but he’s let it soak into Jane’s mind very clever that if Milly Boon was to see her way to take Richard Bewes, then all would be well; but if she cannot rise to it, he’s cruel afraid he must sell.”

“And why for should Milly Boon take Richard Bewes?” asked Jack.

“First, because he loves her with all his heart, I believe, and it would be a natural thing, them being the finest young man and woman in the place; and second, because everything points for it,” declared Mrs. Cobley.  “I wouldn’t go so far as to say Milly wouldn’t have come to it herself given patience in the man, for he’s a fine, ornamental chap and would make a husband for a woman to be proud of.  Besides, Milly has got nought but herself to offer.  She’s dependent on Jane for the clothes on her back, so Bewes would be a lot higher than she might ever have hoped to rise.  She ain’t the only pebble on the beach even as a good-looker.”

“She can’t take him if she don’t love him, however,” said Jack.

But Mrs. Cobley didn’t set much store on that.

“Oh, yes, she could,” the old woman replied.  “Where there’s respect, love often follows.  And there’s Jane to be remembered.  Jane’s been a good aunt to Milly and, in my opinion, the girl ought to see her duty and her pleasure go together, and wed young Bewes.”

“And, if she don’t?” asked Mr. Cobley.

“Then Jane’s in the street and it will be her death, because at her age you can’t transplant her.  You hook her out of that nice little house and she’ll wilt away like a flower and very soon die of it.”

Jack said no more, for he seldom wasted words, but he turned the matter over in his mind and took occasion to see Jane Pedlar a few days after and find out if what his mother had said was true.

“Because, ma’am,” he said; “such things sound a thought contrary to religion and justice in my mind.”

“They be,” admitted Jane.  “They be clean contrary to justice and religion both; but justice and religion are got so weak in Little Silver, that nothing don’t surprise me.”

Well, Jack was all for caution, and he said but little.  He ordained, however, to look into the problem on his mother’s account, and no better man could have done it.  His first thought was whether farmer might not be reasonable.

“Maybe the maiden’s only holding off the young man as maidens will, and be the right one for him after all,” he said.

“Maybe ’tis so,” his mother replied, “but meantime poor dear Jane Pedlar be suffering far too much for an old woman.”