“Yes—it must be a lodger. They do take lodgers. I must ask Barnaby—I meet him on the road sometimes.” She stood still suddenly, going red and white by turns like the revolving lens of a lighthouse. Miss Gentry stared, then smiled in sentimental sympathy “Is he a nice boy?” she cooed. “Who? Ye-es, very nice,” Jinny stammered. “But I’ve just remembered Miss Jones isn’t his sister!” “Who said she was? Oh, Jinny, Jinny!” Miss Gentry sometimes became roguish. “She’s only his stepsister,” Jinny explained desperately. “Mrs. Purley’s first husband was called Jones.” If the bride should really be the Purley creature—the fair charmer who rode so often in Will’s coach as to be almost “keeping company” with him! What a lifting of a nightmare! What a sudden horizon of rose! But no, it was too good to be true! “But I never heard she was called Cleopatra,” she wound up sadly. “People often have a second name hidden away like a tuck,” said Miss Gentry. “But her first name isn’t the same either, it’s Blanche.” “But Bianca _is_ Blanche!” bayed Miss Gentry, like an excited bloodhound. “Only more grand and foreign-like.” Jinny’s colours revolved again. “Is it?” she breathed. But she remembered Mr. Flippance’s address had been announced as Frog Farm. If he had thus ousted young Mr. Flynt, she urged, how could he be living so amicably under his rival’s roof? Besides, how should Mr. Purley’s second wife, a matron as famous for her cheeses as her spouse for his hurdles, have christened her girl so outlandishly? No, Joneses were as abundant as hips and haws, and this Miss Jones could only have come to their out-of-the-way parish—like Mr. Flippance—for reasons of statutory residence, though why the Showman should bury himself to be married, Miss Gentry declared to be an exciting enigma. Perhaps he liked a quiet wedding, Jinny suggested, having too many acquaintances in towns, and with that she dismissed the hope from her mind. But it was not so easy to dismiss the topic from Miss Gentry’s. That lady was rolling the hymeneal discussion under her tongue. She pointed out that Foxearth Farm was not in Little Bradmarsh and was prepared to discuss the romantic ramifications, if it should turn out on the wedding-day that the bride was disqualified. But Jinny cruelly took the sweet out of her mouth. Foxearth Farm _was_ in the parish, she declared. “It’s one of those funny bits, lost, stolen, or strayed into other parishes. I know because of the women from there who come upon our parish for blankets when they’re laid aside——” “Oh, Jinny!” deprecated Miss Gentry, to whom, maternity was as sordid and surreptitious as matrimony was righteously romantic. But Jinny, innocently misunderstanding, persisted. “Why, I remember the fuss when the steam-roller tried to charge our parish for doing up a scrap of the road beyond Foxearth Farm.”