“Dead!” said the Paymaster, “Blessings with her!” Then he turned to his companions and in English--“The best woman in the three parishes and the cleverest. She could put her hand to anything and now she’s no more. I think that’s the last of Ladyfield for me. I liked to go up now and then and go about the hill and do a little bargaining at a wool market, or haggle over a pound with a drover at the fair, but the farm did little more than pay me and I had almost given it up when her husband died.” He looked flushed and uncomfortable. His stock seemed to fit him more tightly than before and his wig sat more askew than ever upon his bald head. For a little he seemed to forget the young messenger still standing in the room, no higher than the table whereon the glasses ranged. Gilian turned his bonnet about in his hand and twisted the ribbons till they tore, then he thought with a shock of the scolding he would get for spoiling his Sunday bonnet, but the thought was quickly followed by the recollection that she who would have scolded him would chide no more. The pensioners shared their attention between the Paymaster and the boy. While the Paymaster gave them the state of his gentleman farming (about which the town was always curious), they looked at him and wondered at a man who had seen the world and had £4 a week of a pension wasting life with a paltry three-hundred sheep farm instead of spending his money royally with a bang. When his confidence seemed likely to carry their knowledge of his affairs no further than the town’s gossip had already brought it, they lost their interest in his reflections and had time to feel sorry for the boy. None of them but knew he was an orphan in the most grievous sense of the term, without a relative in the wide world, and that his future was something of a problem.