me people who feel a keen satisfaction when they are able to
say with Peter Palmer of the Bishop's Farm, 'I told you so, and I knew
how it would be.' Peter certainly repeated this often in the ears of his
daughter, a stolid, heavy woman, whom it was difficult to rouse to any
keen emotion, either of joy or sorrow.

Mrs Burrow was one of those slow people to whom stagnation is life. She
could scarcely read, and her writing was so much like hieroglyphics that
on the rare occasions when she had to sign her name she used to get one
of her nieces to write, 'Dorothy Burrow, her mark,' and then she would
add the cross.

She did not neglect the homely duties which devolved on her as head of
her father's house. She managed the dairy and the poultry, and kept the
farm servants up to the mark.

Her world was a wholly different world from that of her young nieces,
and the imaginative and enthusiastic Bryda especially had nothing in
common with her.

Biddy, who undertook the plain cooking and baking of the establishment,
and had a light hand for pastry and cakes, and who mended the linen with
unexampled neatness, was Mrs Burrow's favourite. She was useful, and had
no new-fangled ways like Biddy, and would make a good wife when her turn
came, but as to that flighty Biddy, the man who married her would repent
it to his last hour.

'Do ask grandfather, Bet, to let me go to Mrs Lambert's.'

'I wonder you are in such a hurry to leave me,' was the reply.

'It's not _you_, it's this humdrum life. Here we live, with no books and
no fun, day after day, month after month, year after year. Why, I shall
be twenty at midsummer, and I have only been to Bristol twice, and to
Wells once by the coach. Oh, Bet, I might as well be a turnip or--'

A laugh from someone near made the girls spring up.

'So Bryda is like a turnip. That's good, I must say.'

'Jack, how you frightened me,' Betty said. 'I thought you was gone back
to Bristol.'

'No, I have got another week's holiday. Uncle Antony sent word by the
carrier that he would as lieve have my room as my company.'

'Oh, Jack, have you quarrelled with Mr Henderson?'

'Not exactly; but I am no favourite of his. Well, aren't you going to
ask me to supper, Betty? I am hungry enough, I can tell you.'

'I must go and find out if there is enough supper for you,' Betty said,
laughing. 'You and Bryda can follow when you like, but, Jack, don't fill
her head with nonsense about going to Bristol. S