e thinking of that, William,' said I. 'Father is sure
to make me promise never to have you--when he's dying, and I can't
refuse him anything. It's just the kind of thing he'd think of.'

Perhaps you will think William ought to have made more stand, for
everybody likes a masterful man; but what stand can you make when
you are up in a belfry with the bells shouting and yelling at you,
and when the girl you are with won't listen to reason? And you have
no idea what them bells were. Often and often since then I have
started up in the bed thinking I heard them again. It was enough to
drive one distracted.

'Well,' says William, 'you'll give me up, but I'll never give you
up; and you mark my words, you and me will be man and wife some
day.'

And as he said it, the bells stopped sudden in the middle of a
change. The rain had come on again. It was very chill up there. My
teeth was chattering, and so was William's, though he pretended he
did it for the joke.

'Let's get inside again,' says he. 'Perhaps they are going home, and
if they are not, we can stay there till they begin it again.'

So we opened the door and crept down the ladder. There was light now
coming up from the bellringers' loft through the holes in the floor,
and we got down to the belfry easy, and as we got to the bottom of
the ladder I heard my father's voice in the loft below--

'I don't believe it,' he was shouting. 'It can't be true. She's a
God-fearing girl.'

And then I heard my mother. 'Come home, James,' she said, 'come
home--it's true. I told you you was too hard on them. Young folks
will be young folks, and now, perhaps, our little girl has come to
shame instead of being married decent, as she might have been,
though Roman.'

Then there was silence for a bit, and then my father says, speaking
softer, 'Tell me again. I can't think but what I'm dreaming.'

Then mother says--'Don't I tell you she said she'd got the
toothache, and she was going to lie down a bit, and I went to take
her up some camomiles I'd been hotting, and she wasn't there, and
her bolsters and pillows, poor lamb, made up to pretend she was, and
Johnson's Ben, he see her along of William Birt by the Parson's
Shave with his arm round her--God forgive them both!'

Then says my father, 'Here's an end on't. She's no daughter o' mine.
If she was to come back to me, I'd turn her out of doors. Don't let
any one name her name to me never no more. I hain't got no
daughter,' he said,