By and by, the squire
put down his pipe, and sat watching with his hands upon his knees. And a
stray child crept up to Charlotte, and climbed upon her lap, and went to
sleep there, and the wind flecked these four representatives of four
generations all over with wavering shadows; and Ducie came backwards and
forwards, and finally carried the sleeping child into the house; and
Stephen, busy as he was, saw every thing that went on in the group under
the top sycamore.

Even before sundown, the last batch of sheep were fleeced and
_smitten_,[Smitten. Marked with the cipher of the owner in a
mixture mostly of tar.] and turned on to the hillside; and Charlotte,
leaning over the wall, watched them wander contentedly up the fell,
with their lambs trotting beside them. Grandfather and the squire had
gone into the house; Ducie was calling her from the open door; she knew
it was tea-time, and she was young and healthy and hungry enough to be
glad of it.

At the table she met Stephen. The strong, bare-armed Hercules, whom she
had watched tossing the sheep around for his shears as easily as if they
had been kittens under his hands, was now dressed in a handsome tweed
suit, and looking quite as much of a gentleman as the most fastidious
maiden could desire. He came in after the meal had begun, flushed
somewhat with his hard labor, and perhaps, also, with the hurry of his
toilet; but there was no embarrassment in his manner. It had never yet
entered Stephen's mind that there was any occasion for embarrassment,
for the friendship between the squire's family and his own had been
devoid of all sense of inequality. The squire was "the squire," and was
perhaps richer than Latrigg, but even that fact was uncertain; and the
Sandals had been to court, and married into county families; but then
the Latriggs had been for exactly seven hundred years the neighbors of
Sandal,--good neighbors, shoulder to shoulder with them in every trial
or emergency.

The long friendship had never known but one temporary shadow, and this
had been during the time that the present squire's mother ruled in
Sandal; the Mistress Charlotte whose influence was still felt in the old
seat. She had entirely disapproved the familiar affection with which
Latrigg met her husband, and it was said the disputes which drove one of
her sons from his home were caused by her determination to break up the
companionship existing between the young people of the two houses at
that t