“She’s very welcome,” said Mrs Rogers.

“How could I stay up there with nobody but Jacob, and that old wolf Sarah?  I wouldn’t be left alone with her for the world.  She’d have me in the Bishop’s Pool before you came back, Janey dear.”

“That wouldn’t matter much to you, would it, Judy?” I said.

“She’s a white wolf, that old Sarah, I know?” was all her answer.

“But what will the old lady say when she finds you brought the young lady here?” asked Mrs Rogers.

“I didn’t bring her, mother.  She would come.”

“Besides, she’ll never know it,” said Judy.

I did not see that it was my part to read Judy a lecture here, though perhaps I might have done so if I had had more influence over her than I had.  I wanted to gain some influence over her, and knew that the way to render my desire impossible of fulfilment would be, to find fault with what in her was a very small affair, whatever it might be in one who had been properly brought up.  Besides, a clergyman is not a moral policeman.  So I took no notice of the impropriety.

“Had they actually to go away on the morning of Christmas Day?” I said.

“They went anyhow, whether they had to do it or not, sir,” answered Jane.

“Aunt Ethelwyn didn’t want to go till to-morrow,” said Judy.  “She said something about coming to church this morning.  But grannie said they must go at once.  It was very cross of old grannie.  Think what a Christmas Day to me without auntie, and with Sarah!  But I don’t mean to go home till it’s quite dark.  I mean to stop here with dear Old Rogers—­that I do.”  The latch was gently lifted, and in came young Brownrigg.  So I thought it was time to leave my best Christmas wishes and take myself away.  Old Rogers came with me to the mill-stream as usual.

“It ‘mazes me, sir,” he said, “a gentleman o’ your age and bringin’ up to know all that you tould us this mornin’.  It ’ud be no wonder now for a man like me, come to be the shock o’ corn fully ripe—­leastways yallow and white enough outside if there bean’t much more than milk inside it yet,—­it ’ud be no mystery for a man like me who’d been brought up hard, and tossed about well-nigh all the world over—­why, there’s scarce a wave on the Atlantic but knows Old Rogers!”

He made the parenthesis with a laugh, and began anew.

“It ’ud be a shame of a man like me not to know all as you said this mornin’, sir—­leastways I don’t mean able to say it right off as you do, sir; but not to know it, after the Almighty had been at such pains to beat it into my hard head just to trust in Him and fear nothing and nobody—­captain, bosun, devil, sunk rock, or breakers ahead; but just to mind Him and stand by halliard, brace, or wheel, or hang on by the leeward earing for that matter.  For, you see, what does it signify whether I go to the bottom or not, so long as I didn’t skulk? or rather,” and here the old man took off his