“Oi’m not denying their looks—a man with half an eye could see that. ’Tis just the handsome gals as seems to throw theirselves away,” he added musingly. “Maybe they are unhappy at home,” suggested the widower, with equal philosophic aloofness. “Or in the housen they stays at,” assented the Gaffer. “But let bygones by bygones. It may be the Lord dumped him down for our good. All Oi say is, that word’s got to goo. A Churchman may not see the blasphemy, but think o’ what John Wesley would ha’ said to it.” “He’d ha’ said ’twas a wicked extravagance to waste such a fine stone.” “The mason’ll take it back. Happen there’ll be another Roger Boldero dead and neaped some day.” “Very likely,” sneered the veteran. “And also an Emma, Wife of the Above.” “Hush!” The little maid nudged him, wondering he should forget his own monition. “That has more sense than you!” cried the Gaffer in high glee. “Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings!” And drawing the astonished Jinny to his bristly beard, he kissed her lips with a hearty smack. Despite these half-understood discords, Jinny was very sorry to leave the stony-eyed veteran and the motley waterside. “Sometimes,” she confided to the more sympathetic swivel eye, as her grandfather was harnessing Methusalem for their return, “I wish I had never come to earth at all.” Again Dap was startled by her simplicity—had not Daniel been telling him what a useful little body she was in the business? “But then you’d never have had your grandfather—or me,” he said, stroking her cheek. “I should have had God—and my angel mother!” IV “Noa, arter she run away with her Boldero Oi’d never cross her doorstep, never,” confessed the old carrier, picking up the story later, as she rode beside him on their day’s work. He was getting so old now that he preferred to talk of twenty rather than of two years before, and the veneer of book-education which his unexpected inheritance of the business had necessitated had fallen away, and he was speaking more and more in the idioms of his illiterate youth, curiously tempered at times by the magnificent English of his Bible. “But that was wicked!” said Jinny decisively. She felt it wrong indeed that a father should thus cut off his daughter, but to have done this when that daughter was an angel (even if only in the making), still more when that daughter was her own mother, seemed to her confused consciousness the climax of iniquity. “Wicked! The contrairy! Oi’d taken my Bible oath never to set foot over her doorstep. So Oi dedn’t have no chance, you see.” Jinny was silenced. She herself had succumbed to an oath, and that indeed on a less awful book.