haberdasher's shop--or be a servant--or--'

'You stop that,' Jack said. 'I'll never see you a servant while I'm
alive. You are too good and too beautiful to be a servant.'

Jack laid emphasis on the last word, with a sharp slap of the whip on
the drowsy old horse's fat back. Not that Jack Henderson wished to
hasten on his way, he would have been content to jog along thus with
Bryda at his side for days. To this simple-hearted young man whom Nature
had designed for a farmer, but whose ambitious mother had willed that he
should be a silversmith and jeweller, in the fond hope that he might
succeed his childless uncle in his Bristol business, Bryda was an idol
at whose shrine he worshipped, and whose smile sent him on his way
rejoicing, while her frown, or a sharp word from her, made him
miserable, and conscious that he was too dull and stupid and clumsy ever
to win her as his wife.

Jack's education had been of the scantiest. It had been begun at a
village dame school, and finished at the Wells Grammar School. It is to
be doubted if any school could have raised Jack Henderson above the
ordinary type of the Somersetshire farmer's son. He had shut his Latin
primer and his English grammar when he left Wells, and had never opened
a book since, except his prayer book on Sundays, and then he could
scarcely spell out the verse of the psalms, and shouted Tate and Brady
to the accompaniment of scraping fiddle and trombone in the gallery of
the church, with a refreshing disregard of words, though he supplied
deficiencies by mystic utterances which filled in doubtful passages and
could be interpreted according to the wishes of the hearer.

Such was Jack Henderson, with his true Somersetshire dialect, where 'Z
was, and is still preferred before 'S, making the speech of the good
people on the Mendips somewhat difficult to understand.

But beneath Jack Henderson's rough exterior beat a true and honest
heart. He was upright in word and deed. Shams were hateful to him, and
he would not try to seem other than he was for all the gold and silver
in his uncle's shop in Corn Street.

He set Bryda down close by the entrance to Bishop's Farm, and said,--

'Look ye here, Bryda, I'll jog off to Bristol to-morrow, and take your
letter myself to Madam Lambert. You put it under the loose stone in yon
wall, and I'll be here at daybreak and trudge off. I'll bring an answer
back in the evening. Come, will this suit you--eh?'

Bryda had already j