The next morning after Robert Strafford had gone off to town to meet Hilda, Ben Overleigh went to his friend’s house and put everything in order, and after having paid special attention to the arrangement of his moustache, he set out to visit Miss Dewsbury, the deaf lady, intending, if possible, to coax her piano out of her. He was a great favourite of hers, and he was indeed the only person who was not thoroughly frightened of her. She was quite seventy years of age, but she had unending strength and vitality, and worked like a navvy on her ranch, only employing a man when she absolutely must. And when she did employ any one, she mounted to the top of the house, and kept watch over him with an opera-glass, so that she might be quite sure she was having the advantage of every moment of his time. The boys in the neighbourhood often refused to work for her; for, as Jesse Holles said, it was bad enough to be watched through an opera-glass, but to have to put up with all her scoldings, and not be able to say a word of defence which could reach her, except through a trumpet--no, by Jove, that wasn’t the job for him! Also there were other complaints against her: she never gave any one a decent meal, and she never dreamed of offering anything else but skimmed milk which people did not seem able to swallow. They swallowed the opera-glass and the trumpet and the scoldings and the tough beef, but when it came to the skimmed milk, they felt that they had already endured enough. So the best people in the valley would not work for Miss Dewsbury--as least, not willingly; and it had sometimes happened that Ben Overleigh had used his powers of persuasion to induce some of the young fellows to give her a few days’ help when she was in special need of it; and on more than one occasion, when he could not make any one else go to her, he had himself offered her his services. Thus she owed him some kindness; and moreover his courtliness and his gentle voice were pleasing to her. He was the only person, so she said, who did not shout down the trumpet. And yet she could hear every word he uttered. This morning when he arrived at her house, she was vainly trying to hear what the butcher said, and the butcher was vainly trying to make himself understood. She was in a state of feverish excitement, and the butcher looked in the last stage of nervous exhaustion. “You’ve just come in time to save my life,” he said to Ben. “For the love of heaven, tell her through the trumpet, that beef has gone up two cents a pound, that she can’t have her salted tongue till next week, and that she has given me seven cents too little.”