“My goodness!” cried Miss Warner.  “That’s the brightest news I’ve heard this longful time, you blessed man!  Oh, Martin, can you get her away from father?  I’ll love you in real earnest—­to my dying day I will—­if you can!”

She sparkled out like that and amazed him yet again.

“I have got her away,” he said.  “And that’s what Mr. Warner’s going to hear from Nelly to-night, so brace yourself against he comes home.”

And that’s what John Warner did hear, of course, put in woman’s nice language, when he went to sup with his intended.  First he was terrible amused to learn that Ball had come courting Nelly because, when he thought on Jane, it looked as if he had been right and she was only putting up a fancied lover to fright him.  In fact, he beamed upon Mrs. Bascombe so far, for it looked as though everything was coming his way as usual after all.

But he stopped beaming when she went on and explained that she was forty and Martin Ball forty-two, and that she’d come to feel Providence had planned everything, and how, only too bitter sure, she felt that Martin was her proper partner, and that John would find his good daughter a far more lasting consolation and support than ever she could hope to be at her best.

John Warner had never been known to use a crooked word, and he didn’t then.  He made no fuss nor yet uproar, for he was a wonder at never wasting an ounce of energy on a lost cause.  He only asked one question: 

“Are you dead sure of what you’re saying, Nelly?” he inquired, looking in her eyes; and she answered that, though cruel grieved to give such a man a pang, she was yet convinced to the roots of her being it must be so.

Then she wept, and he said ’twas vain to work up any excitement on the subject, and that he doubted not it would be all much the same a hundred years hence.  And she granted that he was right as usual.

So he left her, and Martin Ball waited, hid behind the hedge, to see him go; and Jane was home before him.  Then John told his daughter word for word all that had happened at the shop-of-all-sorts; and he wasn’t blind to the joy that looked out of her little eyes.  She didn’t even say she was sorry for him, but just answered as straight as he had and confessed how she’d offered herself within the hour to Martin Ball and found that his views were very much altered and he didn’t want her no more.  “And God knows best, father,” finished up Jane.

“So it’s generally believed,” he answered.  “And nobody can prove it ain’t true.  For my part, you was always balanced in my mind very tender against that changeable woman, and nought but a hair turned the balance her way.  ’Tis a strange experience for me not to have my will, and I feel disgraced in a manner of speaking; but, if I’ve lost her, I’ve gained you, seemingly.  And I shan’t squeak about it, nor yet go courting no more; and I’ll venture to bet, dear Jane, you won’t neither.”