"I'm sure I don't know whatever I'm to do. She's off on her bike for hours together. I can't stop her. She aint like Winnie, always happy with a book. Jane likes lots of friends, and she don't trouble to tell me where she goes, nor what she does with herself." The Squire's look was uncompromising. "She's for ever on the go, wanting amusements. I don't know what's come over the girls nowadays. It's always amusement that they want,—not work." "You must control her." "I never could manage Jane, and that's the truth. She just goes where she chooses, and picks up whoever she comes across. It's her way." "It is a great deal too much her way. She is becoming talked about. In Norfolk, however objectionable such behaviour might be, it did not matter to me personally. I will not allow it here." "I don't see how I'm to stop her." "You must find a way. Jane has to be kept in order." In a lower tone he added: "Do not make it necessary for me to take next year a step which I should be most reluctant to take—to refuse the renewal of your uncle's lease." She was startled out of her stolid unconcern. "You wouldn't! It would kill him." "I should regret extremely having to do it. But—he might have to choose between that and sending you all away,—or rather, sending Jane away. At any cost, I intend to guard my niece's happiness." He could see that she swelled resentfully, and he stood up to say good-bye. No one, noting those two faces, contrasted and antagonistic, would have imagined how in the past their lives had been intertwined; not through any action of his own. The fact was known to themselves only; not even to her children. They watched him from the sitting-room window, as he passed down the garden, and paused for a chat with the farmer; and Mrs. Morris observed— "He's been making a lot of complaints of you, Jane. You've got to mend your ways." "Much obliged!" Jane tossed her head. "He says you're getting talked about in Lynnbrooke. You're always in and out there; and you're a deal too free and noisy with folks. He don't like that sort of thing." Jane tossed her head again. She was extraordinarily unlike Winnie; not only by nature but by training, having been sent by her mother to a very third-rate school, and then having spent years with some distant cousins of her mother in Manchester; undesirable companions for any girl. "He'll have to do without the liking. I'm not his humble slave—I can tell him that. Goodness gracious me, I'm not going to ask him what I may and mayn't do. He seems to think he owns our bodies and souls, because the land belongs to him." "He's always so kind," Winnie put in reproachfully. "Kind to you, if you like. You know how to come over him. He just hates me, and always did. He thinks of me as if I was scum beneath his feet." Jane's metaphor was mixed.