'Don't pay the money to the young scoundrel, don't you do it, and go to Bristol and get out of all the bother.'

'It is not that I want to get out of the bother, Jack,' Bryda said. 'How can you think so? I want to help by going away. Why, yesterday, I wanted to go for my own pleasure, now I _must_ go to try and help. Perhaps Madam Lambert will give me wages in time, then I can be a real help, and send Bet some money, and get comforts for poor grandfather.'

'You must get comforts for yourself first,' Jack said.

He was so pleased that his favourite scheme of getting Bryda to Bristol was to be carried out that he forgot everything else.

'I am going back Monday,' he said, 'and you can come along with me.'

'No,' Bryda said decidedly, as Jack drew a little nearer to her. 'No, Jack, I shall go before Monday. I shall try to make Madam Lambert take me. She is a sort of relation, you know; and if she won't, well, I must try to get into a 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 jumped down into the road, and Jack was standing, with the reins in his hand, anxiously peering into her face.

'Eh, Bryda, will that suit you?'

'Thank you, Jack. Yes, I will have the letter ready. But will your mother be angry?'

'Lor'! why should she? But if she is, it's no odds to me. I say, Bryda, give me--'

But before Jack could finish his sentence Bryda was gone.

She found things at the farm going on much as usual.

The butter was made, the noonday dinner cleared away, Dorothy 'cleaned up' for the afternoon, and seated at the table cutting up some bits of old printed calico for a patchwork quilt.

When she caught sight of Bryda at the open door she called out,--

'Where have you been to? Dinner is done an hour ago. P'r'aps you have had yours at Mistress Henderson's?' This with a sniff of contempt. 'You are mighty partial to these Hendersons, I know I can't abide them.'

Instead of taking any notice of these remarks, Bryda asked,--

'Where's grandfather?'

'At his business, of course. Another lamb is dead, and another ewe past hope. Everything is gone crooked. The last brood of chicks are dying fast as they can. It's all along with Goody Fenton's evil eye. I said so when she sat in the porch Lady-day. I told you you was feeding a bad old woman, and I was right.'

Bryda gave a little incredulous laugh.

'I should feed her again,' she said, 'if she came this way, poor miserable old creature!'

'Wicked old wretch, she'll end in the ducking stool, and serve her right. I'd like to be by and see it, that's all.'

Bryda's imaginative nature had a vein of superstition in it. She was not altogether sure that witchcraft had died out of the land, and she rather liked to hear the stories of elves and fairies, good spirits which made those dark rings on the turf by their dances, when all the rest of the world were asleep.

There was a fascination for her in the notion of a world of little mysterious fairies, who cradled themselves in the deep blue bells of the campanules, and lay in the heart of the tall white lilies, powdering their airy garments with gold, and flying through the air of the still summer nights on the backs of the shy, spotted moths which blundered over the moor, when none were there to see, in chase of a will-of-the-wisp, whose lantern, darting hither and thither, lured them on. She stood thinking for a moment over all the run of ill luck to which Dorothy referred, and then her thoughts went back to the cause of all this trouble, a crime of which she had never known before--her father's sin.

'The sins of the fathers are visited on the children.' Was it to be so in her case and Betty's--Betty, whose wailing cry struck her grandfather's ear when he returned from his sad errand at Bristol, and had parted from his only son for ever?

Then there came over Bryda that strange regret for the ignorance of yesterday, as bliss when compared with the bitter knowledge of to-day.

But with the knowledge came tender regret, the longing to remedy the evil and efface the stain of disgrace from the name she bore.

She said no more to Dorothy, whose huge scissors clipped the square of gay stuff lying before her as if to make the gaudy quilt was the one object of her life, but she ran upstairs to the bedroom she shared with Betty, and found her there, as she expected, exchanging her working gown, with its large apron, for what was called an afternoon frock, with a dainty kerchief and white apron.

'I have seen him,' Bryda exclaimed.

'Seen who?' Bet asked.

'The Squire. He is as hard as nails. He will have the money.'

'Why, Bryda, how did you get to the house?'

'I'll tell you, Bet; but,' she said, 'do get me a bit of something to eat and drink. I am so famished.'

'I wondered what had become of you, but I kept you a currant dumpling in the oven, and a bit of hash. I'll go and fetch it.'

'Yes, I would rather have it here.'

However distressed the young are, and however perplexed, they do not lose their appetite.

Bryda ate everything Betty brought her with keen relish, and drank a cup of cider. Then she said,--'I feel fit for anything now, and now I will tell you the whole story, and what I have resolved to do.'

Betty was a sympathetic listener, but she did not quite see why Bryda should go to Bristol.

'No one wants me here.'

'_I_ want you,' Betty said, 'and if trouble is coming, and the stock sold, and that dreadful young Squire comes here, I shall be frightened without you.'

'He won't come here any more, Bet; he has made up his mind, and he will stick to it, and I want to hear what Mr Lambert says about it all. I suppose it is lawful, if the paper was signed by grandfather, but I should like to tell the whole story to a man who knows about such things. Now, I am going to write my letter to Madam Lambert, and I shall be off to Bristol before the end of the week.'

There was in Bryda's determination a dash of romance as well as of keen desire to do something to help her grandfather in his sore strait.

Of course it may be questioned whether Betty, pursuing the even tenor of her way, and letting nothing interfere with her household work, was not more in the line of duty than her beautiful sister. But the two sisters were, as often happens, so entirely different in character that one cannot be judged by the same rules as the other. The impulsive enthusiast and the matter-of-fact, practical labourer in the field see things from a different standpoint.

In this case there was no division of heart between the two.

Betty believed in Bryda, and had for the whole of her short life looked on her as superior to herself, and to any of the few acquaintances of their own age whom the sisters knew, and she was quite content to take the subordinate place and sit at the feet of her beautiful sister.