This was a wonderfully accurate description of my present state of mind. I looked at Mrs. Tapscott, with the admiration she deserved, and said—“Well then, how be I to goo on with it?” “I’ve athought ’un out,” she made answer bravely; “what you be bound to do, Measter Kit, is never to let she goo back to Lunnon, wi’out zettling zummat.” Here was the whole of it in a nutshell. But how was I to settle anything? “Oh, Tabby, dear Tabby!” I cried, with some loss of dignity, but much gain of truth; “how can I even get the chance of saying a word to her again? This is Wednesday, and she goes back on Friday, and perhaps she never comes again, and there are millions of people between us. Everybody knows what Miss Coldpepper is, as proud as Punch, and as stiff as starch. If I even dared to go near the house, she’d just tell the gamekeeper to shoot me.” “Wull, a young man as have vallen in love must take his chance of shot-guns. But if so be you latts her goo awai wi’out so much as anoother ward, you desarves to have no tongue in the head of ’e.” “How easy it is to talk!” I replied, making ready to leave her, and think by myself. “But how hard and impossible, Tabby, to find any chance of doing anything. I must make up my mind not to see her any more; but to think of her always, as long as I live.” “Boddledicks!” cried Mrs. Tapscott, her favourite interjection of contempt—what it meant we knew not, and probably not she. “Boddledicks, where be the brains of they men? I could tull ’e what to do in half a zecond, lad, to vetch old Coldpepper, and the young leddy too, and every mortial ’ooman in thic there ouze, to hum eartr’e, the zame as if they zighted ’e a burning to the muckpit, with all their Zunday vainery under thee arm.” I looked at Tabby Tapscott with some surprise; for she was giving greater force to her description by using leg and arm as if she bore a share in all of it. And the vigour of her countenance made me smile. But the old woman laughed with a superior air. “Tak’th a bit o’ time, for volks with slow brains to vollew my maind up—don’t her now? Goo up to ’ouze, young man, and stale old Ragless.” “Steal old Regulus!” I cried in great amazement, “why, what good on earth would that do me? And if it would do any good, how am I to manage it? I have not been brought up to that profession.”