"Eh, now, Eliza!" she said good-humouredly, and with something almost like kindliness in her voice, "whatever-like use is it telling a man owt when he’s chock full o’ summat else? Simon was fit to crack himself over some joke as he’d heard in Witham, talking a deal o’ nonsense and laughing fit to shake the trap! Coming from market’s no time any day for telling a man important news, and anyway I’d never ha’ got a word in edgeways if I’d tried." She paused a moment, and then continued, aspiring to still greater heights. "I’d another reason an’ all for wanting it kept quiet. I knew he’d be sure an’ certain to go shouting it out here." "Ay, and why ever not, I’d like to know!" Eliza gasped, when she was able to speak. "Come to that, you were smart enough shoving it down our throats yourself!" "Ay, but that was because I lost my temper," Sarah admitted, with a noble simplicity which again struck the other dumb. "If I hadn’t ha’ lost my temper," she added, "I should ha’ said nowt,--_nowt!_"--a statement so perfectly true in itself that it needed nothing to make it tell. "I never meant you should hear it so sudden-like," she went on gently, the kindness growing in her voice. "It’s hard lines our Geordie should ha’ done so well for himself, and not your Jim. I never meant to crow over you about it, Eliza,--I didn’t, indeed. I never thought o’ such a thing!" Eliza was making a noise like a motor-car trying to start, but Sarah took up her tale before she could reply. "As for letting Simon give in his notice as we’d fixed, I don’t know as it’ll make that much differ, after all. There’s my eyes, for one thing, as I mentioned before. Blind folk is only a nuisance wherever they be, but they’re a real, right-down nuisance on a farm. And Geordie’ll want more nor a farm, I reckon, wi’ all yon brass to splash. He’ll want summat wi’ stables and gardens and happen fishing an’ all,--a grand gentleman’s spot, likely, same as the Hall itself." Mrs. Will felt the world wheeling rapidly about her, and tried to clutch at it as it went. Her temples throbbed and her throat worked, and her staring eyes went blind. She groped her way to the window, and flung up the stiff sash; and, as she stood there, drawing panting breaths, Simon and Will came sauntering through the yard. Her eyes, clearing again in the rush of air, caught the incipient smile on Simon’s face, the new signs of interest and life in his whole look. He could know nothing about the great news, if what Sarah said was true; the utmost that he could do was to sense it in the air. But his look of subtle contentment was a sufficient annoyance in itself. It was the last straw, indeed, which broke the back of Eliza’s self-control. When she turned again her words and her breath came with the leap of a mountain stream.