Margaret Maliphant

								

private exploit of two days ago.
"Yes; I suppose you don't expect me not to know where that black mud
came from on your petticoat last night," remarked she, sententiously.
"Anyhow, I'd advise you to mend your frock, for the squire's in the
parlor, and your mother won't be pleased."
"The squire!" cried I. "Is he going to stay to dinner?"
"Not as I know of," answered the old woman. "But you had better go and
see. Joyce let him in, for I hadn't a clean apron, and I heard him say
that he had come to see the master on business."
"Well, so I suppose he did," answered I.
Deborah smiled, a superior sort of smile. She did not say anything, but
I knew very well what she meant. She was the only person in the house
who openly insisted that the squire came to the Grange after Joyce.
Mother may have thought it; I guessed from many little signs that she
did think it, but she never directly spoke of it. But Deborah spoke of
it, and spoke of it frankly.
It irritated me. I pushed past her roughly to reach the front parlor
windows. I wanted to see the squire to-day, for I wanted to find out
whether our new friend was staying at the Manor.
"You're never going in like that?" cried she.
"Certainly," replied I. "What's good enough for other folk is good
enough for the squire. The squire is nothing to me, nothing at all."
"That's true enough," laughed Deborah. "I don't know as he is anything
to you. But he may be something to other folk all the same. And look
here, Miss Spitfire, there may come a day, for all your silly airs,
when you may be glad enough that the squire is something to some of
you, and when you'd be very sorry if you'd done anything to prevent it.
You go and think that over."
I curled my lip in scorn. "You know I refuse to listen to any
insinuations, Deborah," said I. "The squire comes here to visit my
father, and we have no reason to suppose that he comes for anything
else."
This was quite true. The squire had certainly never said a word that
should lead us to imagine that he meant anything more by his visits
to the Grange than friendship for an old man laid by from his active
life by frequent attacks of gout; but if I had been quite honest, I
should have acknowledged that I, too, entertained the same suspicion as
Deborah did.
"The women must always needs be thinking the men be coming after them,"
muttered Reuben, emerging from the darkness of a shed to the left with
an axe over his shoulder.
If I had been less preoccupied I should have laughed at the audacity of
this remark, which he would certainly not have dared to make unless it
had been for the support of my presence.
"It don't stand to reason," went on Deborah, scorning Reuben's remark,
"that a gentleman like the squire would come here and sit hours long
for naught but to hear the gentry-folk abused by the master. It is a
wonder he stands it as he do, for master is over-unreasonable at times.
But, Lord! you can't look in the squire's eyes and not know he's got a