ot. They showed
her the mug and her face shone. "Oh, now Lady Conant's sent it, it'll
be all proper, ma'am, won't it? 'George' of course he'd have to be, but
seein' what he is we was hopin'--all your people was hopin'--it 'ud be
'Lashmar' too, and that'ud just round it out. A very 'andsome mug quite
unique, I should imagine. 'Wayte awhyle--wayte awhyle.' That's true with
the Lashmars, I've heard. Very slow to fill their houses, they are. Most
like Master George won't open 'is nursery till he's thirty."

"Poor lamb!" cried Sophie. "But how did you know my folk were Lashmars?"

Mrs. Cloke thought deeply. "I'm sure I can't quite say, ma'am, but I've
a belief likely that it was something you may have let drop to young
Iggulden when you was at Rocketts. That may have been what give us an
inkling. An' so it came out, one thing in the way o' talk leading to
another, and those American people at Veering Holler was very obligin'
with news, I'm told, ma'am."

"Great Scott!" said George, under his breath. "And this is the simple
peasant!"

"Yiss," Mrs. Cloke went on. "An' Cloke was only wonderin' this
afternoon--your pillow's slipped my dear, you mustn't lie that
a-way--just for the sake o' sayin' something, whether you wouldn't think
well now of getting the Lashmar farms back, sir. They don't rightly
round off Sir Walter's estate. They come caterin' across us more. Cloke,
'e 'ud be glad to show you over any day."

"But Sir Walter doesn't want to sell, does he?"

"We can find out from his bailiff, sir, but"--with cold contempt--"I
think that trained nurse is just comin' up from her dinner, so 'm afraid
we'll 'ave to ask you, sir... Now, Master George--Ai-ie! Wake a litty
minute, lammie!"

A few months later the three of them were down at the brook in the Gale
Anstey woods to consider the rebuilding of a footbridge carried away by
spring floods. George Lashmar Chapin wanted all the bluebells on God's
earth that day to eat, and--Sophie adored him in a voice like to the
cooing of a dove; so business was delayed.

"Here's the place," said his father at last among the water
forget-me-nots. "But where the deuce are the larch-poles, Cloke? I told
you to have them down here ready."

"We'll get 'em down if f you say so," Cloke answered, with a thrust of
the underlip they both knew.

"But I did say so. What on earth have you brought that timber-tug here
for? We aren't building a railway bridge. Why, in America, half-a-dozen
two