The girl had never heard her gentle mistress speak so sharply--but she herself was past mistress of deceit. She therefore gathered herself up as slowly as possible, in order to gain time, deliberately smoothing down her skirt and carefully brushing off the dirt. The mask of a dark skin has served in many an emergency. Merica could not entirely control the guilty shiftiness of her eyes, but she did it in a measure, and she was quite ready with a deceitful explanation almost as soon as she had recovered her breath. She knew from long experience how easy it was to deceive Miss Judy, the most innocent and artless of mistresses. She also knew--as all servants know the sources of their daily bread--the weak spot in Miss Judy's armor of innocence and artlessness. Accordingly, looking her mistress straight in the face, Merica now said brazenly that she had been over to old lady Gordon's to get the strange young gentleman's clothes; and Miss Judy, blushing rosy red, dropped the subject in the greatest haste and confusion, precisely as Merica expected her to do. The little lady was indeed so utterly routed that she gave the order for the steaming of the peas very timidly; and when Merica, seeing her advantage, followed it up in a most heartless manner by insisting upon boiling them instead, Miss Judy gave way without a struggle, and went silently back to the house as meek as any lamb. She did not mention the matter to her sister; the delicate subject was, in fact, rarely mentioned between them, and it was, of course, never spoken of to any one else. To be sure, everybody in Oldfield had seen Merica coming and going with carefully covered baskets, which, nevertheless, proclaimed the laundry with every withe--as some baskets do, somehow or other, quite regardless of shape; but the fetching and the toting, as Merica phrased these transactions, were usually in the early morning when the neighbors were busy in the rear of their own houses; or in the dusk of evening when the gloaming cast its shadow of softening mystery over the most prosaic aspects of life. And everybody also saw the smoke arising every Monday morning from beneath the wash-kettle, hid in its bower of gooseberry bushes; but no one in all the village would have been unkind enough to ask or even to wonder, whether all the white bubbles arising with the steam could be portions of the two little ladies' own meagre wardrobe. It is true that on one occasion, when Sidney was very, very hard pressed for a new story,--as the most resourceful of professional diners-out must be now and again,--she had been overly tempted into the spinning of a weird and amusing yarn, about seeing a long, ghostly pair of white cotton legs, of unmistakably masculine ownership, flapping over the gooseberry bushes in a high wind as she went home after dark on a certain wild and stormy night. But she could hardly sleep on the following night, her uneasy conscience pricked her so sorely, and, setting out betimes the next