"You might keep a civil tongue in your head?" grumbled Deborah, angrily.
The squire was, I have said, a great favorite with the old woman, who was, so to speak, on the Tory side of the camp, although she would have been puzzled to explain the meaning of the word.
Mother was talking to the squire in her most doleful voice—a voice that she could produce at times, although she was certainly not by nature a doleful woman.
"It has upset me very much," she was saying, and I knew she was alluding to father's indisposition. "He says it is only rheumatics, and I hope it is; but it makes me uneasy. He's not the man he was, and I can't help fancying at times that he has something on his mind that worries him."
The very same words that Deborah had used; but what father should have specially to worry him I could not see.
"He gives too much thought to these high-flown notions of his, Mrs. Maliphant, that's what it is," answered the squire, testily. "It's enough to turn any man's brain."
"Oh, I don't think it's that. I think it cheers him up to think of the misery of the working-classes," declared mother, simply, without any notion of the contradiction of her speech. "I'm sure he's quite happy when he gets a letter from your nephew about the meetings over this children's institution. It's a notion of his own, you see, and he's pleased with it, as we all are with what we have fancied out. Not but what I do say it is a beautiful notion," added mother, loyally. "I pity the poor little things myself; no one more."
This was true. It was the only one of father's "wild notions" that mother had any touch of.
I noticed that the squire had frowned at the mention of Frank's name. He always did; I thought I knew why.
"Yes; that's all very fine, ma'am," he said, "but the trouble is that it won't make his crops grow. No; and paying his laborers half as much again as anybody else won't make his farm pay."