‘You’re a good wife, Mary,’ said the farmer, ‘but you’re a fool for all that. Will the dairy keep the men and horses, and pay for the subsoil dressings and the fish-manure and the losses which every year brings with it? You women don’t understand the number of expenses keeping up a large farm like this entails. I’ve only just done it for years past, and if the rents are to be raised, why, I _can’t_ do it, and that’s all.’ ‘But you won’t decide in a hurry, father?’ said Nell. ‘No, lass, no. But it’s very discouraging. It takes the heart out of a man for work, or anything. Sometimes I wish I had emigrated when I was a young man. There, out in Canada, the Government give a man one hundred and fifty acres of land free, and, if he’s got a little money of his own and a little gumption, he can make a living for his family, and have something to leave behind him when he dies.’ ‘Well, well,’ said his daughter soothingly, ‘if the worst comes to the worst, father, I will go out to Canada with mother and you, and we’ll see if we can’t manage to keep ourselves alive somehow.’ She put her hand on the old man’s grey head as she spoke, and he got hold of it and drew it down with his own. ‘What a soft, white hand it is!’ he said admiringly. ‘You’re a good, kind lass, Nell, but I doubt if you could do much work with such fingers as these. Where did you get them from? Who’d think you’d done hard work in your lifetime? They look like a lady’s, so smooth and soft. You must have had a fine easy place of it up at Lord Ilfracombe’s, Nell. It was a pity you ever left it. You won’t get such another in a hurry.’ ‘No, father, I know that,’ she answered sadly. ‘And you think you were foolish to chuck it, my girl? You fret a bit over it sometimes, eh, Nell?’ ‘Sometimes, father,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Ah, my lass, you see we never know what’s best for us. I was main glad to see ye home, so was mother; but if times get worse than they are, I shall be sorry ye ever came.’ ‘Then I’ll go to service again,’ she answered quickly. ‘Don’t be afraid I’ll ever be a burden on you, dear father. I am capable of filling many situations--a nurse’s, for instance. If, as you say, times get worse, I’ll practise on little Griffith, and advertise for a place in the nursery.’ She spoke in jest, but Mr Llewellyn took her words in earnest. ‘Ay, my lass, and you’d get it too. The earl would give you a grand character, I’m bound to say. Wouldn’t he, now? Three years is a good time to stay in one place.’ ‘Yes, yes, of course,’ said Nell hastily, as she remembered the circumstances under which she had left Grosvenor Square, and hurried away for fear her father should take it in his head to question her about it.