‘I should think so,’ said Oliver, with decision. He knew the man—a fellow with a specious address, and the glamour of expectations from a rich uncle in the Customs, which served him as an apology for losing such mongrel situations as he occasionally condescended to fill, and for loafing away the greater portion of his days, hanging on to other and humbler relations than the autocrat in the Customs, the credulous Cobbes for instance, always in a lazy, often in a disreputable fashion. He was just the sort of acquaintance, full of false pretensions, vulgar smartness, and strongly-flavoured dash, to take the fancy of an ignorant, ill-brought-up, wilful girl like ’Mily Polley. And on the man’s side, he would not hesitate to amuse himself with her openly-expressed admiration, as the best joke going. But Sally was eager to empty her budget. ‘Mrs. Polley she finds out that ’Mily is snapping her fingers in her mother’s face,’ the storyteller resumed the thread of her narrative, nothing loth, ‘and keeping company with Birt on the sly, continually: so the old woman’s temper, as is none of the coolest at the best of times, flies into a blaze, and she up and dares the gal to see the fellow again, or she will be turned to the door, as not worthy of such a home, and to serve as a warning to her sisters. Mrs. Polley, if you please, never lets ’Mily out of her sight from that moment, except at night, when the mother locks the gals’ room door on them, in their hearing. ‘Sure enough, it is no more use than locking the stable-door after the horse has got his head out of the halter, and kicked up his heels in giving the stable-boy the go-by. And the black affront before the rest of the family—certain to leak out too, with the feeling of a gaol, after the liberty the gal had snatched, in spite of Mrs. Policy’s tantrums, druv Miss ’Mily from bad to worse. She goes and throws dust into the eyes of them sillies of sisters, or else she scares them into telling no tales; she bribes the poor slavey of a maid. Any how, Master Oliver, she manages to give her mother the slip again, gets out of the house after it is shut up for the night, and runs and meets the scoundrel at the improperest hours. All is up with the foolish, wrong-headed lass’s good name then, Master Oliver, I need not go for to tell you. Mrs. Polley catches her youngest daughter a stealing in at the airy-door, under cloud of night, and thrusts her out with her own hand, raging that ’Mily is never to cross her mother’s honest threshold again. She will have nought more to say to the gal; she may go back to where she came from.