Mr. Hayes stands on the rug, and hides a little yawn behind his little hand. "Is Masters trying to make himself agreeable?" he asks. "Let me know if I am to look out for another housekeeper, Barbara." Barbara has no brilliant reply ready. The hackneyed joke displeases her. As her uncle speaks, she can actually see Littlemere, the village where the small squire lives; a three-cornered green, tufted with rushy grass, with a cow and half-a-dozen geese on it; a few cottages, with their week's wash hung out to dry; a round pond, green with duckweed; a small alehouse; a couple of white, treeless roads, leading away into the world, but apparently serving only for the labourers who plod out in the morning and home at night; an ugly little school-house of red brick and slate; and Littlemere Hall, square, white, and bare, set down like a large box in the middle of a dreary garden. She cannot help picturing herself there, with Mr. Masters, caught and prisoned; the idea is utterly absurd, but it is hideous, as hateful as if an actual hand were laid on her. She shrinks back and frowns. "You needn't get anybody just yet," she says. "Very good," her uncle replies. "Give me a month's warning, that's all I ask." He yawns again, and looks at his watch. Reynold takes the hint, and his candle, and goes. "Good riddance!" says the little man on the rug. "Of all the ill-mannered, cross-grained fellows I ever met, there goes the worst! A Rothwell! He's worse than any Rothwell, and not the genuine thing either! Can't he behave decently to my friends at my own table? What does he mean by his confounded rudeness? Masters is a better man than ever he will be!" Barbara shuts the piano, and lays her music straight. Poor little Barbara, trying with little soft speeches and judicious silences to steer her light-winged course among these angry men, is sorely perplexed sometimes. Now as Mr. Hayes mutters something about "an unlicked cub," she thinks it best to say, "Well, uncle, it isn't for very long. Mr. Harding will soon be going away." "Yes, he'll soon be going away, and for good too! Never will _he_ set foot inside Mitchelhurst Place again--I can tell him that! When he crosses the threshold he crosses it once for all. Never again--never again!" This time Barbara, who is looking to the fastenings of the windows, is in no haste to speak. She feels as if she had been conspiring with Harding, and, remembering their schemes for his return, her uncle's reiterated assurances ring oddly and mockingly in her ears. "When he crosses the threshold, he crosses it once for all." No, he does not! He is going away to work, he will come back and buy the Place of Mr. Croft, he will be living there for years and years when poor Uncle Hayes is dead and gone. And she, Barbara, has done it all. With a word and a look she has given a master to Mitchelhurst. But, being a prudent girl, she merely says "Good night." CHAPTER X. AN AFTER-DINNER DISCUSSION.