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 significant common sense that lay in her last allusion to him, he went to his room and grimly began his packing.