‘Then, Keziah, you have been talked over,’ said Anne, with some indignation, rising up from her desk. ‘Worth has been worrying you, and you have not been able to resist her. Why did you not tell her, as I told you, to come and have it out with me?’ ‘I don’t know what good that would have done, Miss Anne. It was me that had to settle after all.’ ‘Of course it was you that had to settle. Had it been anyone else I should not have lost all this time, I should have interfered at once. Keziah, do you know what you are doing? A young girl like you, just my age--(but I am not so young, I have had so much to think of, and to go through), to sell herself to an old man.’ ‘Miss Anne, I’m not selling myself,’ said Keziah, with a little flush of resentment. ‘He hasn’t given me anything, not so much as a ring--I wouldn’t have it of him--I wouldn’t take not a silver thimble, though he’s always teasing--for fear you should say---- Whatever anyone may think, they can’t say as I’ve sold myself,’ said Keziah proudly. ‘I wouldn’t take a thing from him, not if it was to save his life.’ ‘This is mere playing upon words, Keziah,’ said Anne, towering over the victim in virtuous indignation. ‘Old Saymore is well off and poor Jim has nothing. What do you call that but selling yourself? But it is not your doing! it is Worth’s doing. Why doesn’t he marry _her_? It would be a great deal more suitable than marrying you.’ ‘He don’t seem to see that, Miss Anne,’ said Keziah with a demure half curtsey: a certain comic sense of the absurdity of marrying the aunt when the niece was by, crept into the profound seriousness of her looks. That anybody should suppose old Saymore would marry Worth gave the girl a melancholy amusement in spite of herself. ‘She would be far more suitable,’ cried Anne in her impetuous way. ‘I think I’ll speak to them both and set it before them. It would be a thousand times more suitable. But old Saymore is too old even for Worth: what would he be for you?’ Keziah looked at her young mistress with eyes full of very mingled feelings. The possibility of being delivered by the simple expedient of a sudden match got up by the tormentors themselves gave her a half-frightened visionary hope, but it was mixed with a half-offended sentiment of proprietorship which she could scarcely acknowledge: old Saymore belonged to her. She would have liked to get free from the disagreeable necessity of marrying him, but she did not quite like the idea of seeing him married off to somebody else under her very eyes.