d
said he might do it himself.

Barnett came to the other end a couple of hundred yards away, and began
to find fault with the way in which the dahlias were being tied up.

But John Grange bore it all without a word, though his lips quivered a
little.

This was repeated, and Grange felt that it was the beginning of a course
of persecution to drive him away.

Barnett went down the long green path till nearly at the end, when the
dinner-bell began to ring, and just then he came upon the scythe lying
where the man had thrown it in his pet.

"Humph!" ejaculated Barnett. "Well, he won't have Mrs Mostyn to take
his part. Pretty thing if I can't find fault with those under me."

At that moment he turned, and there, a hundred yards away, was John
Grange coming along to his dinner, erect, and walking at a fair pace
along the green walk, touching the side from time to time with his stick
so as to keep in the centre.

The idea came like a flash, and Daniel Barnett glanced round. No one
appeared to be in sight, and quick as thought it was done. One sharp
thrust at the bent handle was sufficient to raise the scythe blade and
swing it round across the green path, so that the keen edge rose up and
kept in position a few inches above the grass right in John Grange's
path as he came steadily on.

The next moment Barnett had sprung among the bushes, and was gone.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

The late Albert Smith, in his _Christopher Tadpole_, describes a lady
whose weakness was periwinkles. Old Hannah likewise had a weakness, but
it was not for that unpleasant-looking curly mollusc which has to be
wriggled out with a pin, but, as she expressed it, "a big mellow
Williams pear with a maddick in it."

Old Hannah's "maddick" was, of course, a maggot in north-country
language, but it was not that she had a liking for the larva of a fly,
but for the fruit in which that maggot lived for as a gardener's wife
she knew well enough that very often those were the finest pears, the
first to ripen, that they fell off the tree and were useless for the
purpose of dessert, and were often left to rot. So that, knowing well
his wife's weakness, old Tummus would pick up a fallen pear when he saw
it under the tree in September, show it to old Dunton, who would nod his
head, and the destination of that pear would be Tummus's pocket.

Now there was a fine old pyramid pear-tree not far from the green walk,
and while hoeing away at the weeds that