From the maid Nancy turned her thoughts to the master, and admitted to herself, not for the first time, that she would have liked Uncle John better if he had held up his head and looked at people like a man, instead of glancing at them sideways with the look of a dog that has been in mischief and is afraid somebody knows. His own daughter, her cousin Ellen, said he was a “screw”; but Nancy saw no signs of that characteristic in the home; and he had always seemed fond of her and treated her as generously as could be expected of a man of his type. Still there was something—and because of that indefinable something Nancy banked her profits in Keepton, and allowed her uncle—who was too deeply absorbed in his own affairs to trouble himself about hers—to think she was as extravagant as her cousin. Aunt Eleanor, on the other hand, was a downright nice woman, with only one fault worth speaking of, and which she had transmitted to her daughter—that she looked upon country places as “holes,” and upon Mawm as the least endurable of them all. Aunt and cousin were towns-women through and through, and the latter had certain superficialities of education that Nancy lacked and despised; but though they had money, “society” closed its doors to them, and their friends were all of the lower middle classes from which both parents had sprung and to which by every right save that of money they still belonged. That was how she had made the acquaintance of Inman, with whose mother Uncle John had lodged when he began business for himself, and whom the so-called “banker” held in high esteem as a young fellow who knew how to use his elbows in “pushing along.” She was stopping in bed to think about Inman and to try to determine what her relations with him in these new circumstances were to be; where too she must place him in her scale of values. Apart from his rough wooing and the complacency with which he took its rejection she had nothing against the man; there was, indeed, something in his sturdy independence and almost impudent conceit that appealed to her moorwoman’s spirit; though her lips curled scornfully as she recalled the air of calm certainty with which on two occasions—once in Airlee and again on the night of his arrival in the village—he had received her cold refusal. It was evident enough that he thought he had only to wait, and the bird would be found in the snare. Would it! The curl on the girl’s lips straightened into a thin line of defiance at the mental suggestion. It would have paid the man, she said to herself, to be a little less cocksure, and a little more humble; to have given the leaven time to work instead of wanting to bake his cake and eat it within five minutes. Then, perhaps—