“Oh, indeed!” said Lancelot.  “It’s missus that has corrupted you, is it?  And pray what used you to say?”

“She,” said Mary Ann.

Lancelot was taken aback.  “She!” he repeated.

“Yessir,” said Mary Ann, with a dawning suspicion that her own vocabulary was going to be vindicated; “whenever I said ‘she’ she made me say ‘’er,’ and whenever I said ‘her’ she made me say ‘she.’  When I said ‘her and me’ she made me say ‘me and she,’ and when I said ‘I got it from she,’ she made me say ’I got it from ‘’er.’”

“Bravo!  A very lucid exposition,” said Lancelot, laughing.  “Did she set you right in any other particulars?”

“Eessir—­I mean yessir,” replied Mary Ann, the forbidden words flying to her lips like prisoned skylarks suddenly set free.  “I used to say, ’Gie I thek there broom, oo’t?’ ‘Arten thee goin’ to?’ ‘Her did say to I.’  ’I be goin’ on to bed.’  ‘Look at—­’”

“Enough!  Enough!  What a memory you’ve got!  Now I understand.  You’re a country girl.”

“Eessir,” said Mary Ann, her face lighting up.  “I mean yessir.”

“Well, that redeems you a little,” thought Lancelot, with his whimsical look.  “So it’s missus, is it, who’s taught you Cockneyese?  My instinct was not so unsound, after all.  I dare say you’ll turn out something nobler than a Cockney drudge.”  He finished aloud, “I hope you went a-milking.”

“Eessir, sometimes; and I drove back the milk-trunk in the cart, and I rode down on a pony to the second pasture to count the sheep and the heifers.”

“Then you are a farmer’s daughter?”

“Eessir.  But my feyther—­I mean my father—­had only two little fields when he was alive, but we had a nice garden, with plum trees, and rose bushes, and gillyflowers—­”

“Better and better,” murmured Lancelot, smiling.  And, indeed, the image of Mary Ann skimming the meads on a pony in the sunshine, was more pleasant to contemplate than that of Mary Ann whitening the wintry steps.  “What a complexion you must have had to start with!” he cried aloud, surveying the not unenviable remains of it.  “Well, and what else did you do?”

Mary Ann opened her lips.  It was delightful to see how the dull veil, as of London fog, had been lifted from her face; her eyes sparkled.

Then, “Oh, there’s the ground-floor bell,” she cried, moving instinctively toward the door.

“Nonsense; I hear no bell,” said Lancelot.

“I told you I always hear it,” said Mary Ann, hesitating and blushing delicately before the critical word.

“Oh, well, run along then.  Stop a moment—­I must give you another kiss for talking so nicely.  There!  And—­stop a moment—­bring me up some coffee, please, when the ground floor is satisfied.”

“Eessir—­I mean yessir.  What must I say?” she added, pausing troubled on the threshold.

“Say, ‘Yes, Lancelot,’” he answered recklessly.

“Yessir,” and Mary Ann disappeared.