“Not a doubt of it.  But why look as if you had seen a ghost?”

“And what do you suppose will happen?”

“Mother and Molly will cry, and Emmy will make an oration which I shall interrupt, and Kezzy will open her eyes at such a monster, and father will want to horsewhip me, but restrain himself and turn me from the door.  Or perhaps he will lock me up—­oh Patty, cannot you see that I’m weeping, not joking?  But it has to be done, and I am going to be brave and do it.”

“Very well, then.  Now listen to me.—­You cannot.”

“Cannot?  Why?”

“There’s no room, to begin with—­not a bed in the house.  Sam and his wife are there, and the child, on a visit.”

“Sam there!  And you never told me.—­Oh, Pat, Pat, and I might have missed him!” She sprang up from the bed and began her dressing in a fever of haste.

“But what will you do?”

“Go home and find Sam, of course.”

“I don’t see how Sam can help you.  He did not help Emmy much:  and his wife will be there, remember.”

There was no love lost between Sam’s sisters and Sam’s wife—­a practical little woman with a sharp tongue and a settled conviction that her husband’s relatives were little better than lunatics.  She understood the Rectory’s strict rules of conduct as little as its feckless poverty (for so she called it).  That a household which held its head so high should be content with a parlour furnished like a barn, sit down to meals scarcely better than the day-labourers’ about them, and rest ignored by families of decent position in the neighbourhood, puzzled and irritated her.  “Better he paid his debts and fed his children,” was her answer when Sam put in a word for his father’s spiritual ambitions.  Her slight awe of the Wesleys’ abilities—­even she could not deny them brains—­only drove her to entrench herself more strongly behind her practical wisdom; and she never abandoned her position (which had saved her in a thousand domestic arguments) that her sisters-in-law had been trained as savages in the wilds.  She had a habit of addressing them as children:  and her interference, some years before, between Emilia and young Leybourne, had been conducted by letter addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Wesley and without pretence of consulting Emilia’s feelings.

Hetty pondered this for a moment, but without pausing in her dressing.

“Besides,” urged Patty, “they may be gone by this time.  Mother did not say how long the visit was to last; only that Sam had brought his bill for Jacky and Charles, and it is enormous.  Father will be in the worst possible temper.”

“Of all the wet blankets—­” began Hetty, but was interrupted by the ringing of a bell in the corner above her bed.  It summoned her to run and dress Rebecca, who slept in a small room opening out of Mrs. Grantham’s.

Hetty departed in a whirl.  Patty stood considering.  “She never would!  ’Tis a mercy sometimes she doesn’t mean all she says.”