George,"--the Inspector
halted in the middle of the roadway--"I want you to do me a favour, or
rather, to promise one."

"What is it?"

"I want you to promise that, if these fellows get rid of Miss Marvin, you
will see that she suffers no harsh treatment from them. I can find her
another post, no doubt; but there may be an interval in which you can
help."

"Very well," Sir George answered, after a pause. "I can manage that.
But they'll eject her, you may bet."

CHAPTER XIII.

TOM TREVARTHEN INTERVENES.

When the company had departed Hester arranged her small troop at their
desks--boys and girls and 'infants'--and made them a speech. It was a
very short speech, asking for their affection, and somehow she found
herself addressing it to Myra, whose dark eyes rested on her with a stare
of unyielding suspicion. On hearing that the two children were to attend
the Board School, Aunt Purchase had broken out into vehement protest, the
exact purport of which Myra did not comprehend. But she gathered that a
wrong of some kind was being done to her and (this was more important) to
Clem, and she connected it with the loss of their liberty. Until this
moment she had known no schooling. Her grandmother in stray hours had
taught her the alphabet and some simple reading, and the rest of her
knowledge she had picked up for herself. She well remembered the last of
these stray hours. It fell on a midsummer evening, three years before,
when she and Clem--then a child of four--had spent a long day riding to
and fro in the hay waggons. Now Mrs. Rosewarne for the last few years of
her life, and indeed ever since Myra could remember, had been a cripple,
confined to the house or to her small garden, save only when she entered
an ancient covered vehicle (called 'the Car') and was jogged into Liskeard
to visit her dressmaker, or over to Damelioc to attend one of Lady
Killiow's famous rose fetes. It was the hour of sunset, then, and in the
shadow of the hedge old Pleasant, the waggon-horse, having Clem on his
back, stood tethered, released from his work, contentedly cropping the
rank grass between the clusters of meadow-sweet, and whisking his tail to
brush off the flies. The horse-flies had been pestilent all day, and
Myra was weaving a frontlet of green hazel twigs to slip under Pleasant's
headstall, when she happened to turn and caught sight of her grandmother
standing by the upper gate, leaning on her ivory-headed staf