‘Your day!’ cried Mr. Piper, growing bold in his scorn. ‘Your day, be hanged! Nobody comes on your day. You might as well call it Queen Elizabeth’s day, or Nebuchadnezzar’s day. You’ve laid yourself out to know a parcel of arrogant people that don’t want to know you, and you’ve turned up your nose at people that give three hundred guineas for a pair of horses, and live in handsome houses of their own building, and brag about the money they have earned with their own industry, instead of bragging about their great-grandfathers. You want to keep company with the Tudors and the Plantagenets. Nothing less than that will satisfy you. But they won’t have you, and if you want any one to admire your fine clothes and eat your fine dinners you’d better be content with my friends.’ Mr. Chumney’s arrival brought the conversation to an abrupt finish. He was a long lean man, with iron-gray hair and whiskers, thick black eyebrows, and an intelligent expression which atoned in some measure for his gaunt ugliness. He loved Ebenezer Piper with the affection of a faithful dog that has never known but one master, and with regard to all the rest of the world he was strictly misanthropic. He was not a scandalmonger like Miss Coyle. He generally thought the worst of people, but he always kept his thoughts to himself. He believed every business man, except Mr. Piper, to be an innate rogue, and on the verge of insolvency, but he gave no expression to his doubts. He was not a lively companion, so far as conversation goes, but he was an accomplished listener; he had the art of looking ineffably wise, and of appearing to be able to give an immense deal of information, if he had not preferred to withhold it. He was like the great Lord Thurlow. Nobody ever could have been so wise as Samuel Chumney looked. From the hour she became acquainted with Mr. Chumney Bella had hated him. She did not know why. It might have been his eyebrows, it might have been his vulgarity. For some undiscovered reason he was more obnoxious to her than any creature she had ever met. She thought him clever, and she had a lurking idea that he was able to read her as easily as he could read a book. She fancied that he knew everything that was passing in her mind--that he was perfectly familiar with her motive for marrying his old employer--that he had weighed and measured her till he was master of her most secret thoughts. She lectured her husband for his cultivation of Chumney; but she was wonderfully polite to Mr. Chumney himself. She feared him too much to be discourteous to him. CHAPTER XI. CAPTAIN STANDISH.