and caught her to his leaping heart.

LXVIII

In the weeks that followed, Lynette, in the course of many interviews held
with Janellan Pugh on the subject of lunch and dinner, learned much anent
the difficulty of obtaining fresh fish in a sea-coast village, more as
regards the Satanic duplicity with which even a Calvinistic Methodist
butcher will substitute New Zealand lamb for the native animal, and still
more about Saxham.

Janellan, who had been a rosy maid in the service of the Doctor's
grandfather, the Parson, had thought the world's worth of Master Owen,
from the first time she set eyes on him in a white frock, with a
sausage-roll curl and diamond-patterned socks. She had a venerable and
spotty photograph of him as a square-headed, blinking little boy in a
velvet suit and lace collar, and another photograph, coloured by hand,
taken at the age of fourteen, and paid for out of his own pocket-money, to
send to Janellan, who had nursed him through a holiday scarlet-fever. And
regularly had her blessed boy remembered her and Tafydd, said Janellan,
until the Cruel Time came, and he was lost sight of in Foreign Parts. Then
Mrs. Saxham died, and the Captain--mentioned by Janellan with the ringing
sniff that speaks volumes of disparagement--had turned her and her old man
out of the Plas "without as much as that!"--here Janellan snapped her
strong thumb-nail against her remaining front tooth--in recognition of
their forty years of faithful service.

But Master Owen, coming to his own again, "and 'deed an' 'deed, but the
Plas ought to have been his from the beginning!" had sought out the old
couple, living in decent poverty at St. Tirlan's, and reinstated them in
their old home. And well might Tafydd, who was a better judge of the
points of a pig than any man in Herion--or in all Wales for the matter of
that--well might Tafydd declare that the Lord never made a better man than
Dr. Owen Saxham! What grand things they had said of him in the papers! No
doubt the young mistress would have plenty more to tell that had not got
into print?

"I can tell you many things of the Doctor," said Lynette, smiling in the
black-eyed, streaky-apple face "that you and Tafydd will be proud and glad
to hear."

She shunned the giving or receiving of caresses as a rule but this morning
she stooped and kissed the red-veined, wrinkled cheek within Janellan's
white-quilled cap-border. Then, her household duties done, she pinned a
rough