“Clarion?” questioned Tabitha.

“Yes.  Have n’t you seen how—­how—­that he—­the man, has taken possession of him?  Thomas says the two sneak off together every chance they get, and sometimes are n’t back till eleven or twelve.  I wish dadda would put a stop to it.  Like as not, ’t is for pilfering they are bound.”  Miss Meredith began anew on the buttonhole, and had she been thrusting her needle into either man or dog, she could not have sewed with a more vicious vigour.

“That must be the way he got those rabbits for thy mother.”

“I should know he had been a poacher,” asserted Janice, as she contemptuously held up and surveyed at arms-length the completed shirt.  Then she laid it aside with another, and sighed a weary, “Heigh-ho, those are done.  Here I have to work my fingers to the bone making shirts for him, just because mommy says he has n’t enough clothes,”—­a sentence which perhaps partly accounted for the maiden’s somewhat jaundiced view of Charles.

“Are those for him?” cried Tabitha.  “Why didst thou not tell me?  I would have helped thee with them.”

“You ’d have been welcome to the whole job.  As it is, I’ve done them so carelessly that I know mommy will scold me.  But I wasn’t going to work myself to death for him!”

“I should have loved—­I like shirt-making,” fibbed Tabitha.

“And I hate it!  Forty-two have I made this year, and mommy has six more cut out.”

There was a moment’s silence, and then Tabitha said, “Janice.”  For some reason the name seemed to embarrass her, for the moment it was spoken she coloured.

“What?”

“Dost thee not think—­perhaps—­if we steal out and take the shirts to the stable, thy mother will never—?”

“Tibbie Drinker!  Go out of the house in a sack?  I’d as soon go out in my night-rail.”

“Thee breakfasts in a negligee, even when Philemon is here,” retorted Miss Drinker.  “Wouldst as lief breakfast in thy shift?”

“No,” said Miss Janice, with a wicked sparkle in her eyes, “because if I did Philemon would come oftener than ever.”

“Fie upon thee, Janice Meredith!” cried her friend, “for a froward, indelicate female.”

“And why more indelicate than the men who’d come?” demanded Janice.

“’Immodest words admit of no defence,
For want of modesty is want of sense,’”

quoted Miss Drinker.

“Rubbish!” scoffed Janice, but whether she was referring to the stanza of the reigning poet of the eighteenth century, or simply to Miss Tabitha’s application of it, cannot be definitely known.  “You know as well as I, Tibbie, that I’d rather have Philemon, or any other man, see me in my shroud than in my rail.  Come, we’ll change our frocks and take a walk.”