‘Uncertain--but soon, I suppose. Edward, you see, can do anything pretty nearly, and yet can’t get a straightforward living. I wish sometimes I had kept him here, and let professions go. But he was such a one for the pencil.’ He dropped the lever in the hedge, and turned to his visitor. ‘Now then, missie, if you’ll come indoors, please.’ Gad Weedy looked with a placid criticism at Cytherea as she withdrew with the farmer. ‘I could tell by the tongue o’ her that she didn’t take her degrees in our county,’ he said in an undertone. ‘The railways have left you lonely here,’ she observed, when they were indoors. Save the withered old flies, which were quite tame from the solitude, not a being was in the house. Nobody seemed to have entered it since the last passenger had been called out to mount the last stage-coach that had run by. ‘Yes, the Inn and I seem almost a pair of fossils,’ the farmer replied, looking at the room and then at himself. ‘O, Mr. Springrove,’ said Cytherea, suddenly recollecting herself; ‘I am much obliged to you for recommending me to Miss Aldclyffe.’ She began to warm towards the old man; there was in him a gentleness of disposition which reminded her of her own father. ‘Recommending? Not at all, miss. Ted--that’s my son--Ted said a fellow-draughtsman of his had a sister who wanted to be doing something in the world, and I mentioned it to the housekeeper, that’s all. Ay, I miss my son very much.’ She kept her back to the window that he might not see her rising colour. ‘Yes,’ he continued, ‘sometimes I can’t help feeling uneasy about him. You know, he seems not made for a town life exactly: he gets very queer over it sometimes, I think. Perhaps he’ll be better when he’s married to Adelaide.’ A half-impatient feeling arose in her, like that which possesses a sick person when he hears a recently-struck hour struck again by a slow clock. She had lived further on. ‘Everything depends upon whether he loves her,’ she said tremulously. ‘He used to--he doesn’t show it so much now; but that’s because he’s older. You see, it was several years ago they first walked together as young man and young woman. She’s altered too from what she was when he first courted her.’ ‘How, sir?’ ‘O, she’s more sensible by half. When he used to write to her she’d creep up the lane and look back over her shoulder, and slide out the letter, and read a word and stand in thought looking at the hills and seeing none. Then the cuckoo would cry--away the letter would slip, and she’d start wi’ fright at the mere bird, and have a red skin before the quickest man among ye could say, “Blood rush up.”’ He came forward with the money and dropped it into her hand. His thoughts were still with Edward, and he absently took her little fingers in his as he said, earnestly and ingenuously--