"Don't be so foolish, Joseph," cried Mrs Portlock. "Do talk sense. Has Mr Cyril Mallow gone?" "Yes, he's gone back home," said the farmer. "Why didn't you ask him to stay and have a bit of dinner with us?" "Because I didn't want him, mother. He only walked home with me to ask about a bit o' rabbit shooting." "But still, it would have been civil to ask him to stop. It's market-day, and there's the hare you shot on Friday, and a bit o' sirloin." "Tchah! he wouldn't have cared to stay. He dines late and fashionable-like at home." "I'll be bound to say he'd have been very glad to stop," said Mrs Portlock, bridling. "Fashionable, indeed! He got no fashionable dinners when he was working his way home at sea, nor yet when he was out in the bush." "Where he had much better have stayed--eh, Luke?" said the farmer. "He does no good but idle about here." "Idle, indeed!" cried Mrs Portlock, taking up the cudgels, rather indignantly, on the young man's behalf. "It might be idling if it was Luke Ross here, but Mr Cyril Mallow's a gentleman and a gentleman's son, and he has a right to work when he likes and leave off when he likes." "Oh! has he?" said the Churchwarden, smiling at their visitor, as much as to say, `Now, just you listen.' "Well, I'm not a learned man, like Luke Ross here, who has got his Bible at his tongue's end." "As every man who calls himself a good man ought to," said Mrs Portlock, tartly. "Sage!" "Yes, aunt," came from the next room, where the speaker could hear every word. "Tell them to take the dinner in directly. And, for my part, Joseph, I think if you'd read your Bible a little more o' Sundays you'd be a better man." "You wouldn't like me so well if I was a better man, old lady," he laughed; "but, as I was going to say, when I used to read of such things I got it into my head that the first specimen of a man as was made was a working man, to till the ground, and not idle and loaf about, and eat the fruit and shoot the rabbits in the Garden of Eden." "For shame, father, to talk in that way!" cried the lady. "And I wonder that you speak so disrespectfully of Mr Cyril Mallow. For my part, I think he's a very nice, gentlemanly young fellow, and it's too bad for people to be always sneering about him as they are."