"Awh! iss, I dare say," said Joan with scornful contempt: "you allays think you knaws better than they you'm bound to listen to. Howsomedever, when all's said and done, I shall finish with the same I began with--that you'd no right to send that letter." "Well, you've told me that afore," said Jerrem sullenly. "Iss, and now I tells 'ee behind," retorted Joan, "and to front and to back, and round all the sides--so there!" "Oh, all right!" said Jerrem: "have your talk out: it don't matter to me;" and he threw himself down on the settle with apparent unconcern, taking from his breast-pocket a letter which he carefully unfolded.--"Did you know that I'd got a letter gived me to Guernsey, Eve," he said--"one they'd ha' kept waitin' there for months for me?" Eve looked up, and, to her vexation, saw Jerrem reading the letter which on her first arrival she had written: the back of it was turned toward her, so as to ostentatiously display the two splotches of red sealing-wax. "Why, you doan't mane to say you've a-got _he?_" exclaimed Joan, her anger completely giving way to her amazement. "Well, I never! after all this long whiles, and us a-tryin' to stop un, too!--Eve, do 'ee see he's got the letter you writ, kisses and all?" "Joan!" exclaimed Eve in a tone of mingled reproof and annoyance, while Jerrem made a feint of pressing the impressions to his lips, casting the while a look in Eve's direction, which Joan intercepting, she said, "Awh! iss I would, seeing they'm so much mine as Eve's, and you doan't know t'other from which." "That's all you can tell," said Jerrem. "Iss, and all you can tell, too," replied Joan; adding, as the frown on his face betokened rising anger, "There, my dear, you'd best step inside wi' me and get a drop more o' your mornin's physic, I reckon." "Physic?" growled Jerrem. "I don't want no physic--leastwise, no more than I've had from you already." "Glad to hear it," said Joan. "When you change your mind--which, depend on it, 'ull be afore long--you'll find me close to hand.--I must make up a few somethin's for this evenin'," she said, addressing Eve, "in case any of 'em drops in. Adam's gone off," she added, "I don't know where, nor he neither till his work's done." "Might just as well have saved hisself the trouble," growled Jerrem. "No, now, he mightn't," replied Joan. "There's spurrits enough to wan place and t'other to float a Injyman in, and the sooner 'tis got the rids of the better, for 'twill be more by luck than good management if all they kegs is got away unseen." "Oh, of course Adam's perfect," sneered Jerrem. Then, catching sight of Eve's face as he watched Joan go into the kitchen, he added with a desponding sigh, "I only wish I was; but the world's made for some: I s'pose the more they have the more they get."