“I’ll tell you who she is,” returned his mother in a low, emphatic tone. “she’s just what I say—­a sticker and an interloper.”

“H’m!  Shouldn’t wonder if the green-eyed monster had got after mamma,” soliloquized the youth aloud.  “Somebody else sews on the buttons now, perhaps.”

“’Zekiel Forbes, we must have an understanding right off.  You’ve got to joke and tease, I s’pose, but it can’t be about Mr. Evringham.  This is like a law of the Medes and Persians, and I want you should understand it.  The more you see of him the less you’ll dare to joke about him.”

“I told you he scared me stiff,” acknowledged Zeke, running the harness through his hands to discover another dingy spot.

“Well, he’d better.  Now I wouldn’t gossip to you of my employer’s affairs—­I hope we’re better than two common servants—­but I want you to be as loyal to him as I am, and to understand a few of the reasons why he can’t go giggling around like some folks.”

“Great Scott!” interpolated the young coachman.  “Mr. Evringham go giggling around!  So would Bunker Hill monument!”

“Listen to me, Zeke.  Mr. Evringham has had two sons.  His wife died when the oldest, Lawrence, was fifteen.  Well, both those boys disappointed him.  Lawrence when he was twenty-one married secretly a widow older than himself, who had a little girl named Eloise.  Mr. Evringham made the best of it, and helped him along in business.  Lawrence became a broker and had made and lost a fortune when he died at the age of thirty-five.”

“Broke himself, did he?” remarked the irrepressible ’Zekiel.

“Yes, he did.  Here we were, living in peace and comfort,—­my employer at sixty a man of settled habits and naturally very set in his ways and satisfied with his home and the way I had run it for him for fifteen years,—­when three blows fell on him at once.  Firstly his son Lawrence failed and was ruined; secondly he died; and thirdly his widow and her daughter nineteen years old came here a couple of months ago and settled on Mr. Evringham, and here they’ve stayed ever since!  I don’t think they have an idea of going away.”  Mrs. Forbes’s eyes snapped.  “Such an upset as it was!  I couldn’t show how I felt, of course, for it was so much worse for him than it was for me.  He had never cared for Mrs. Evringham, and scarcely knew the girl who called him ‘grandfather’ without an atom of right.”

“Hard lines,” observed ’Zekiel.  “Does the girl call herself Evringham?”

“Does she?” with scorn.  “Well I guess she does.  Of course she was only four when her mother married Lawrence, and I guess she was fond of her stepfather and he of her, because he never had any children; but sometimes I ask myself, is it going on forever?  I only hope Eloise’ll get married soon.”

’Zekiel dropped the harness to arrange imaginary curls on his temples and pat the tie on his muscular neck.  “If she’s pretty I’m willing,” he responded.