attempt at interest, but his attention still preoccupied with the
open doorway.

"Oh, THEY know all about it!" said Minty, following the direction of his
abstracted eyes with a slight darkening of her own, "I jest kem out o'
the kitchen the other way, and Jim sent 'em a note; but I allowed I'd
tell YOU myself. Specially ez you are going away to-morrow."

"Who said I was going away to-morrow?" asked Mainwaring, uneasily.

"Loo Macy!"

"Ah--she did? But I may change my mind, you know!" he continued, with a
faint smile.

Minty shook her curls decisively. "I reckon SHE knows," she said dryly,
"she's got law and gospel for wot she says. But yer she comes. Ask her!
Look yer, Loo," she added, as the two women appeared at the doorway,
with a certain exaggeration of congratulatory manner that struck
Mainwaring as being as artificial and disturbed as his own, "didn't Sir
Francis yer say he was going to-morrow?"

"That's what I understood!" returned Louise, with cold astonishment,
letting her clear indifferent eyes fall upon Mainwaring. "I do not know
that he has changed his mind."

"Unless, as Miss Sharpe is a great capitalist now, she is willing to use
her powers of persuasion," added Mrs. Bradley, with a slight acidulous
pointing of her usual prim playfulness.

"I reckon Minty Sharpe's the same ez she allus wos, unless more so,"
returned Minty, with an honest egotism that carried so much conviction
to the hearer as to condone its vanity. "But I kem yer to do a day's
work, gals, and I allow to pitch in and do it, and not sit yer swoppin'
compliments and keeping HIM from packin' his duds. Onless," she stopped,
and looked around at the uneasy, unsympathetic circle with a faint
tremulousness of lip that belied the brave black eyes above it, "onless
I'm in yer way."

The two women sprang forward with a feminine bewildering excess of
protestation; and Mainwaring, suddenly pierced through his outer selfish
embarrassment to his more honest depths, stammered quickly--

"Look here, Miss Sharpe, if you think of running away again, after
having come all the way here to make us share the knowledge of your good
fortune and your better heart, by Jove! I'll go back with you."

But here the two women effusively hurried her away from the dangerous
proximity of such sympathetic honesty, and a moment later Mainwaring
heard her laughing voice, as of old, ringing in the kitchen. And then,
as if unconsciously responding to the significan