"It don't matter," said 'Bias after a few seconds' reflection. "He took it for granted that one of us was tellin' lies: and likely enough he's chucklin' now at the thought of our faces when the thing came to be cleared up. Come to consider, there was no vice about the trick, 'specially as he wouldn' take any money from me." "Nor from me," Cai dropped into his chair and reached for the tobacco-jar. "Well," he sighed, "the man's done for both of us, that's all!" "Not a bit," said 'Bias sturdily. "We'll walk up early to-morrow, and explain. Ten to one it'll put her in the best o' tempers, havin' such a laugh against us both." PART II. "He can't have known!" said Mrs Bosenna early next morning, sitting in a high-backed chair beside the kitchen-table. Her face was slightly flushed, and the toe of her right shoe kept an impatient tap-tap on the flagged floor. "He can't possibly have known." "We'll hope not," said Dinah. "It's thoughtless, though--put it at the best: and any way it don't speak too well for his past." "He may have _bought_ it, you know," urged Mrs Bosenna; "late in life." "Well, he's no chicken," allowed Dinah; "since you put it like that." "I wasn't referring to Captain Hunken, you silly woman. I meant _it_." "Eh?" said Dinah. "Oh!--_him?_" "'Him' if you like," Mrs Bosenna mused. "It can't possibly be a female, can it?" "I should trust not, for the sake of a body's sex . . . to say things like that. Besides, I've surely been told somewhere--in the 'Child's Guide to Knowledge,' it may have been--that the females don't talk at all." "Are you sure of that?" "Pretty sure. It was _something_ unnatural anyhow; or I shouldn' have remembered it." "Well, and if so," said Mrs Bosenna, "one can see what Providence was driving at, which is always a comfort. . . . I was wondering now if you mind going and carrying him out to the garden somewhere. He couldn't take harm in this weather,--under the box-hedge, for instance." Dinah shook her head. "I couldn', mistress; no really!" "The chances are," said Mrs Bosenna persuasively, "he wouldn't say anything,--anything like that again, not in a blue moon." "He said it to me first, and he said it to me again not ten minutes later. But, o' course, if you're so confident, there's nothing hinders your goin' and takin' him where you like. If you ask my opinion, though, he don't wait for no blue moons. He turns 'em blue as they come." Mrs Bosenna tapped her foot yet more pettishly. "It's perfectly ridiculous," she declared, "to be kept out of one's own parlour by a bird! Go and call in William Skin, and tell him to take away the nasty thing." "And him with a family?" "He's hard of hearin'," said Mrs Bosenna.