“I’m not going to tell nothing; I want to be left quiet,” cried Lottie, who felt much inclined to burst into a passion of tears; while her simple brother looked on in surprise, rubbing his shock of hair, as he was wont to do when perplexed.
A third time Mrs. Green shook her head; solemnly, ominously she shook it. “Well,” she muttered, “if girls will behave like that, after all the schooling, and praying, and preaching, and—;” the rest of the observation was unheard by the Stones, as their landlady had left the room as she uttered it, slamming the door behind her. Lottie knew by her manner that the cobbler’s wife was offended; and was convinced that within an hour the story of the five sovereigns would be spread all over Axe, as was already that of Abner’s arrival at Southampton, Deborah, in her efforts to procure money for her journey, having found it impossible to obey her husband’s injunction of secrecy.
“Lottie, how did you get all that money?” asked her brother, as soon as Mrs. Green’s heavy clumping step was heard descending the stair.
“Oh, don’t you be a-worritting me too, Steady!” exclaimed Lottie, calling the lad by a name which Arthur Madden had given to him in the class, and which had clung to him, from its appropriateness, till it had almost superseded his own.
Steady was not wont to “worrit” any one, and least of all the sister to whose brighter intelligence he had habitually looked up through his clouded boyhood, and whom he heartily loved. He was easily silenced, but not easily relieved. He sat down by the casement to his usual occupation of cutting pegs, but ever and anon a heavy sigh came from the poor youth’s breast.
“You’re troubled about father?” asked Lottie, who was laying out the rough-dried linen which she was about to iron for her mother.
“I warn’t a-thinking of father, but of that money,” replied the lad, in his slow, measured drawl: he had difficulty in putting even the most simple thought into words.
“Steady, surely you know me, you can trust me!” cried Lottie, with a swelling heart.
“I does trust you,” said the lad emphatically, “but other folk won’t;” and with another sigh he relapsed into silence.
Very sadly Lottie pursued her occupation of ironing. “Oh,” thought she, “I wish that I could smooth away all these difficulties, as I press down the creases out of this linen! Father ill—Mr. Arthur dying—mother away—and then this dreadful, dreadful promise! Oh, that I never had made it!”