When the tears had spent themselves, she relinquished her hold of the astonished old man, who leaned over the table to her, and dominated by the spirit of her touch, whispered, like one who had accepted a bond of secresy:  “Th’ old farmer’s well.  So’s Rhoda—­my darkie lass.  They’ve taken on a bit.  And then they took to religion for comfort.  Th’ old farmer attends Methody meetin’s, and quotes Scriptur’ as if he was fixed like a pump to the Book, and couldn’t fetch a breath without quotin’.  Rhoda’s oftenest along with your rector’s wife down there, and does works o’ charity, sicknussin’, readin’—­old farmer does the preachin’.  Old mother Sumfit’s fat as ever, and says her money’s for you.  Old Gammon goes on eatin’ of the dumplins.  Hey! what a queer old ancient he is.  He seems to me to belong to a time afore ever money was.  That Mr. Robert’s off...never been down there since he left, ’cause my darkie lass thought herself too good for him.  So she is!—­too good for anybody.  They’re going to leave the farm; sell, and come to London.”

“Oh, no!” exclaimed Dahlia; “not going to leave the dear old farm, and our lane, and the old oaks, leading up to the heath.  Are they?  Father will miss it.  Rhoda will mourn so.  No place will ever be like that to them.  I love it better than any place on earth.”

“That’s queer,” said Anthony.  “Why do you refuse to go, or won’t let your husband take you down there; if you like the place that raving-like?  But ’queer’’s your motto.  The truth is this—­you just listen.  Hear me—­hush!  I won’t speak in a bawl.  You’re a reasonable being, and you don’t—­that’s to say, you do understand, the old farmer feels it uncomfortable—­”

“But I never helped him when I was there,” said Dahlia, suddenly shrinking in a perceptible tremble of acute divination.  “I was no use.  I never helped him—­not at all.  I was no—­no use!”

Anthony blinked his eyes, not knowing how it was that he had thus been thrown out of his direct road.  He began again, in his circumlocutory delicacy:  “Never mind; help or no help, what th’ old farmer feels is—­and quite nat’ral.  There’s sensations as a father, and sensations as a man; and what th’ old farmer feels is—­”

“But Rhoda has always been more to father than I have,” Dahlia cried, now stretching forward with desperate courage to confront her uncle, distract his speech, and avert the saying of the horrible thing she dreaded.  “Rhoda was everything to him.  Mother perhaps took to me—­my mother!”

The line of her long underlie drawn sharp to check her tears, stopped her speaking.

“All very well about Rhoda,” said Anthony.  “She’s everything to me, too.”

“Every—­everybody loves her!” Dahlia took him up.

“Let ’em, so long as they don’t do no harm to her,” was Anthony’s remark.  There was an idea in this that he had said, and the light of it led off his fancy.  It was some time before he returned to the attack.