he family; it was, indeed, Aunt
Amy alone to whom he had not thought it worth while to pay court. To her
alone he would not come when she called, by her alone he would not
be cajoled, even though she offered him sugary tea, his deadliest
temptation. No, he sat and looked at her through his hair, his fiery eye
glinting, his peaked beard ironically humorous, his leg stuck out from
his body, a pointing signal of derision.

She resolved to wait for an opportunity when she might conquer Hamlet
and Jeremy together, but her power in the house was slight, so long as
Mr. and Mrs. Cole were there. "If I only had the children to myself,"
she would say, "I would improve their manners in many ways. Poor
Alice--!" Then suddenly she did have them. At the beginning of May Mr.
Cole was summoned to take a mission to the seamen of Drymouth, and Mrs.
Cole, who had relations in Drymouth, accompanied him. They would be
absent from Pelchester a whole week.

"Oh, won't Aunt Amy be a nuisance," said Jeremy, realising the
situation. Then turning to Mary he added: "We'll pretend to do what she
tells us and not do it really. That's much the easiest."

A week is a short time, especially at the beginning of a shining and
burning May, but Aunt Amy did her best not only with the children but
with the servants, and even old Jordan, the gardener, who had been with
the Cole family for twenty years. During that short week the cook, the
parlourmaid, Rose, the housemaid, and the bootboy all gave notice, and
Mrs. Cole was only able to keep them (on her return) by raising the
wages of all of them. Jordan, who was an old man with a long white
beard, said to her when she advised him to plant pinks where he had
planted tulips and tulips where he had planted pinks, and further
inquired why the cauliflower that he sent in was so poor and the
cabbages so small: "Leave things alone, Miss, Nature's wiser than we
be, not but what you mayn't mean well, but fussin's never done any good
where Nature's concerned, nor never will"; and when she said that he was
very rude to her, he shook his head and answered:

"Maybe yes, and maybe no. What's rude to one ain't rude to another"--out
of which answer she could make nothing at all.

In the schoolroom she sustained complete defeat. At the very outset she
was baffled by Miss Jones. She had always despised Miss Jones as a
poor unfortunate female who was forced to teach children in her old
age because she must earn her living