"They will never let me go." Then she did not yet know! He kept his counsel. "The farmers and their wives really are my friends, and they are so good and true—so real. Blunt, of course, but that is their way. I know all the cottagers. No, not district-visiting. When I go to see them, it is because I love to go, not because I ought. Barbara and Miss Robins call because they want to do the people good. But when I go, they do 'me' good—without any trying." "That might seem the better way." He was interested, but he wanted to get her out of this sedate mood, to see again the long lashes mischievously drooped. "Barbara says one ought to be always trying to do good to somebody. Don't you hate being done good to as a duty?" "I'm not sure that I have had experience in that line." "How nice! But I've had any amount. There's Mr. Timkins. He's not a Yorkshireman; he is from the south, and he mends old shoes. He thinks he can mend people too!" with a gleam of fun. "Miss Robins says she has 'the very highest opinion of him.' But I dislike his prosy preachings." Phyllys stopped to pluck a flower, and surveyed it with eyes of loving admiration. "I suppose Mr. Timkins really is 'good,'" she remarked, with the air of one unravelling a perplexity. "But so are other people who don't think as he does. I never can understand why all good people must have exactly the same opinions about every single thing. Can you?" "Good gracious, no!" "I've never been allowed to go to Castle Hill, because all of you don't see things just the same as Grannie and Barbara. I'm hardly ever allowed to know strangers who come to Midfell in the summer, for fear they should do me harm. And I'm not a child now. It is time I should begin to think for myself." "You have not always lived here?" "About ten years. Since I was thirteen. Of course I was old enough then to understand, and not to forget afterwards. When people talk as they do, and say all sorts of hard things about those who think differently from themselves, I always know that my father and mother would have felt with those people, and not with people here. Don't you see, it rubs me the wrong way awfully sometimes." CHAPTER VI A BURNISHED STREAM "IS this what you call the Dale-head?" asked Giles. "Perhaps more properly higher up. But I think we mean the whole of the valley, as far as you can see, and beginning here. Isn't it pretty?" It was more than pretty. She used a word inadequate. They were seated by the river, on its grass bank. Not the little Midfell stream, but a more important watercourse; a river to which the Midfell stream was a tributary.