den faces in settling your courses," he ventured, as the keeper
retreated for the cheese.

"The conversation is taking a very strange turn: nothing that I have ever
done warrants such things being said!" murmured Fancy with emphasis, just
loud enough to reach Dick's ears.

"You think to yourself, 'twas to be," cried Enoch from his distant
corner, by way of filling up the vacancy caused by Geoffrey's momentary
absence. "And so you marry her, Master Dewy, and there's an end o't."

"Pray don't say such things, Enoch," came from Fancy severely, upon which
Enoch relapsed into servitude.

"If we be doomed to marry, we marry; if we be doomed to remain single, we
do," replied Dick.

Geoffrey had by this time sat down again, and he now made his lips thin
by severely straining them across his gums, and looked out of the window
along the vista to the distant highway up Yalbury Hill. "That's not the
case with some folk," he said at length, as if he read the words on a
board at the further end of the vista.

Fancy looked interested, and Dick said, "No?"

"There's that wife o' mine. It was her doom to be nobody's wife at all
in the wide universe. But she made up her mind that she would, and did
it twice over. Doom? Doom is nothing beside a elderly woman--quite a
chiel in her hands!"

A movement was now heard along the upstairs passage, and footsteps
descending. The door at the foot of the stairs opened, and the second
Mrs. Day appeared in view, looking fixedly at the table as she advanced
towards it, with apparent obliviousness of the presence of any other
human being than herself. In short, if the table had been the
personages, and the persons the table, her glance would have been the
most natural imaginable.

She showed herself to possess an ordinary woman's face, iron-grey hair,
hardly any hips, and a great deal of cleanliness in a broad white apron-
string, as it appeared upon the waist of her dark stuff dress.

"People will run away with a story now, I suppose," she began saying,
"that Jane Day's tablecloths are as poor and ragged as any union
beggar's!"

Dick now perceived that the tablecloth was a little the worse for wear,
and reflecting for a moment, concluded that 'people' in step-mother
language probably meant himself. On lifting his eyes he found that Mrs.
Day had vanished again upstairs, and presently returned with an armful of
new damask-linen tablecloths, folded square and hard as boards by long