“Excuse me, Miss Marker, if you please,” said Mrs. Cutthumb; “but if I may make so bold to say, you are very young yourself, Miss, in years, though not in worship. And to be run away with from school is a thing that may occur to any girl when bootiful. But concerning of Miss Kitty—bless her innocent young face!—what you was pleased to say, ma’am, is most surprising.” “No, Mrs. Cutthumb, very far from that, when you come to consider what human nature is. I never could do such things myself; I never could sleep easy in my bed if I thought that they ever could be imputed to me. But when we look at things it is our duty to remember that the world is made up of different people from what we are.” “What experience you have had, ma’am, and yet keeping your complexion so! Ah, if my poor Cutthumb could have kept away from the imperial! But he said it were the duty of a Briton, and he done it. Sally, get away into the back yard with your dolly. I beg your pardon, ma’am, for interrupting you of your words so.” “Well, one thing I make a point of is,” Mrs. Marker continued with a gentle frown, “never to enter into any domestic affairs, though without any bias of any sort, out of doors. We all have enough, as you know, Mrs. Cutthumb, and sometimes more than we can manage, to regulate our own histories. Miss Coldpepper is a remarkable lady, so very, so highly superior; but her niece, our Miss Kitty, does not seem as yet to take after her in that particular; and scarcely to be wondered at, when you remember that she is not her niece at all of rights. But this is not a question to interest you much, nor any one outside of what I might call the Coldpepper domesticity.” “What superior words you always do have, as it were, in your muff, Mrs. Marker! But if you please to mean, Miss—being still so young I slips into it naturally—the Coldpepper Manor, why I was born upon it, and so was my parents before me. And that makes it natural, as you might say, and proper for me to have a word to say about them. I remember all the Coldpeppers since I was that high; and it shall never go no further.” “There is nothing to conceal. You must never fancy that of them. The Coldpeppers always were a haughty race, and headstrong; but bold, and outspoken, and defying of their neighbours. It was bad for any one who crossed them: you know that, if you remember old Squire Nicholas. But Miss Kitty Fairthorn is not a Coldpepper. You see you don’t know everything about them, Mrs. Cutthumb. The captain had been married before he ever saw Miss Monica.”