She looked at the young folk, and chuckled and winked, and they nudged each other and laughed, too. But Sarah did not laugh as she waited behind the chairs, or Simon, red to the ears, and recalling the machinations of Eliza’s youth. He pushed one of his nieces roughly out of his way and took her place, while Sarah went slowly to seat herself on the red plush chair that was warranted not to hurt her poor patched gown. "I hope there’s summat for you, I’m sure!" Eliza went on, when the giggling and whispering had died down, and Simon’s thin cheeks had lost their furious red. She cast an anxious glance down the well-filled table, but her tone was complacency itself. "Folks as come late can’t expect to find everything just so.... Ay, I give you up a long while back. Sally here’ll tell you I give you up. ’Sally,’ I says to her, ’likely yon old horse’ll be put to it to do the extra bit, and so they’ve happen thought better on’t, and gone straight home. You’re that used to good horses, Sally,’ I says, ’you don’t rightly know how poor folks has to shift. Not but what they’ll get a deal better tea here than they will at home, Sally,’ I says, ’and though I says it as shouldn’t, that’s the truth! Ay, they’ll come to tea, I’ll be bound, Sally,’ I says, but I changed my mind when I thought on the old horse." Sarah said nothing in reply to this, partly because her brain was swimming with the heat of the room, but chiefly because she never did say anything until Eliza was well ahead in the race for speech. This particular method helped her to reserve her strength, but at the same time it deepened the bitterness in her heart. It would have been better for both of them if they could have got the inevitable tussle over at the start; exhaustion on both sides might have brought at least a pretence at amity in its train. But it had always been Sarah’s instinct to hold herself back, and time had turned the instinct into a fixed need. For the moment, at least, her strength was certainly to sit still.