“Mrs. Pepperill, I will go after Kitty, I promise you, if you will wait over to-day. I am Kitty’s friend, as I was once the friend of your Wilmot, and if you will suffer me, I will remain in the house with you, to relieve you, all day, and do what work you desire.” “No, no!” gasped Zerah; “I must be alone. I will have no one here but Kitty.” “You consent to the delay?” The woman did not refuse; she shook herself free from Rose and the rector, retreated to the window, and cast herself on the bench in it, and cried and moaned in her hands held over her face. When Rose proposed to Mrs. Pepperill that she should go to Brimpts to fetch Kate, a scheme had formed itself in her brain. She would ask Jan Pooke to drive her. At the time of our story two-wheeled conveyances, gigs, buggies, tax-carts, were kept only by the well-to-do, and there were but three in all Coombe’the parson’s trap, and those of Pasco Pepperill and yeoman Pooke. Her own father, the miller, though a man of substance, had not taken the step of providing himself with a trap; to have done so would have been esteemed in the parish an assertion of wealth and importance that would have provoked animadversion, and might have hurt his trade. The miller is ever regarded with mistrust. His fist is said to be too much in the meal-sack, and had he dared to start a two-wheeled conveyance, it would at once have been declared that it was maintained, as well as purchased, at the expense of those who sent their corn to be ground at his mill. But now that Rose considered her scheme at leisure, it did not smile on her as at first. At the moment she proposed it, the prospect of a long drive by Jan’s side, of union in sympathy for Kitty, had promised something. Now that she reviewed her plan, she foresaw that it might be disastrous. Kate, when she heard the tidings of the fire and the news of the disappearance of her father, would be thrown into great distress, and a distressed damsel is proverbially irresistible to a swain. It might undo all that Kate had done, make Jan more enamoured than ever, and he as a comforter might gain what he had failed to win when he approached as a lover. Rose was a good-hearted, if a somewhat wayward girl. She desired to do a kind thing to Kitty, but not at such a cost to herself. She turned the matter over in her head, and finally reached a compromise. She would ask Jan to drive her to Brimpts so as to fetch Kate, but lay the injunction on him, for Kitty’s sake, not to say a word relative to the loss of her father. Grieved Kate would be to hear of the burning of the storehouse, but not heart-broken. The consumption of so much coal would not extort tears. A sorrowful girl is only interesting’a heart-broken one is irresistible. XXXIX ONE FOR THEE AND TWO FOR ME