I curled my lip in scorn. "You know I refuse to listen to any insinuations, Deborah," said I. "The squire comes here to visit my father, and we have no reason to suppose that he comes for anything else."
This was quite true. The squire had certainly never said a word that should lead us to imagine that he meant anything more by his visits to the Grange than friendship for an old man laid by from his active life by frequent attacks of gout; but if I had been quite honest, I should have acknowledged that I, too, entertained the same suspicion as Deborah did.
"The women must always needs be thinking the men be coming after them," muttered Reuben, emerging from the darkness of a shed to the left with an axe over his shoulder.
If I had been less preoccupied I should have laughed at the audacity of this remark, which he would certainly not have dared to make unless it had been for the support of my presence.
"It don't stand to reason," went on Deborah, scorning Reuben's remark, "that a gentleman like the squire would come here and sit hours long for naught but to hear the gentry-folk abused by the master. It is a wonder he stands it as he do, for master is over-unreasonable at times. But, Lord! you can't look in the squire's eyes and not know he's got a good heart, and it's Miss Joyce's pretty face that'll get it to do what she likes with, you may take my word for it. The men they don't look to the mind so much as they look to the face, and the temper—and Joyce, why, her temper's as smooth as her skin; you can't say better than that."
This was true, and Deborah was right to say it in praise, although I do believe in her heart she had even a softer spot for me and my bad temper than for Joyce and her gentle ways.
"Birds of a feather, I suppose."
"You seem to think that it's quite an unnatural thing for two men to talk politics together, Deborah," said I, with a superior air of wisdom. "But perhaps the squire is wiser than you fancy, and thinks that at his time of life politics should be more in his way than pretty faces."
Deborah laughed, quite good-humoredly this time.