Dick looked anxious.

“Will you pass me some bread?” said Fancy in a flurry, the red of her face becoming slightly disordered, and looking as solicitous as a human being could look about a piece of bread.

“Ay, that I will,” replied the unconscious Geoffrey.  “Ay,” he continued, returning to the displaced idea, “we are likely to remain friendly wi’ Mr. Shiner if the wheels d’run smooth.”

“An excellent thing—­a very capital thing, as I should say,” the youth answered with exceeding relevance, considering that his thoughts, instead of following Geoffrey’s remark, were nestling at a distance of about two feet on his left the whole time.

“A young woman’s face will turn the north wind, Master Richard:  my heart if ’twon’t.”  Dick looked more anxious and was attentive in earnest at these words.  “Yes; turn the north wind,” added Geoffrey after an impressive pause.  “And though she’s one of my own flesh and blood . . . "

“Will you fetch down a bit of raw-mil’ cheese from pantry-shelf?” Fancy interrupted, as if she were famishing.

“Ay, that I will, chiel; chiel, says I, and Mr. Shiner only asking last Saturday night . . . cheese you said, Fancy?”

Dick controlled his emotion at these mysterious allusions to Mr. Shiner,—­the better enabled to do so by perceiving that Fancy’s heart went not with her father’s—­and spoke like a stranger to the affairs of the neighbourhood.  “Yes, there’s a great deal to be said upon the power of maiden faces in settling your courses,” he ventured, as the keeper retreated for the cheese.

“The conversation is taking a very strange turn:  nothing that I have ever done warrants such things being said!” murmured Fancy with emphasis, just loud enough to reach Dick’s ears.

“You think to yourself, ’twas to be,” cried Enoch from his distant corner, by way of filling up the vacancy caused by Geoffrey’s momentary absence.  “And so you marry her, Master Dewy, and there’s an end o’t.”

“Pray don’t say such things, Enoch,” came from Fancy severely, upon which Enoch relapsed into servitude.

“If we be doomed to marry, we marry; if we be doomed to remain single, we do,” replied Dick.

Geoffrey had by this time sat down again, and he now made his lips thin by severely straining them across his gums, and looked out of the window along the vista to the distant highway up Yalbury Hill.  “That’s not the case with some folk,” he said at length, as if he read the words on a board at the further end of the vista.

Fancy looked interested, and Dick said, “No?”

“There’s that wife o’ mine.  It was her doom to be nobody’s wife at all in the wide universe.  But she made up her mind that she would, and did it twice over.  Doom?  Doom is nothing beside a elderly woman—­quite a chiel in her hands!”

A movement was now heard along the upstairs passage, and footsteps descending.  The door at the foot of the stairs opened, and the second Mrs. Day appeared in view, looking fixedly at the table as she advanced towards it, with apparent obliviousness of the presence of any other human being than herself.  In short, if the table had been the personages, and the persons the table, her glance would have been the most natural imaginable.