"Come, you youngster," said the squire, coming down the path with Mary Thorne, and speaking in his hearty, healthy voice, "isn't that leg of yours well enough yet for you to walk alone and not trouble a poor old man?"
The child flushed scarlet, and father said, in a vexed tone, "I'm not so very old yet, squire, but I can carry a poor little cripple a couple of hundred yards."
The squire had spoken only in joke, and he said so; it was his way, for in reality he was as kind a man as father himself, but I don't think father forgave him for quite a little while.
"Well, did you see anything of that good-for-nothing nephew of mine up in London?" asked the squire again.
We were all standing round in a little group, as folk are wont to do coming out of church, when they rarely get time to meet on week-days. Mother was talking to that aggressive old lady, Miss Farnham; Joyce stood at her side. I could not see Harrod anywhere, but it was just like him to have disappeared; he hated a concourse of people.
"Oh, come, Mr. Broderick, I don't think you ought to take away a poor fellow's character when he's absent," laughed Mary Thorne, in her jolly way. "Here's Miss Maliphant," added she, pointing at Joyce, "might be prejudiced against him by it, and he thinks a very great deal of what Miss Maliphant's opinion of him may be, I assure you."
She said it in a good-natured, bantering kind of way, but not at all as if she guessed at the real relations that existed between Joyce and her childhood's friend.
The squire frowned, and mother turned away from Miss Farnham.
"Now, Miss Thorne, I should take it very kindly if you wouldn't bring my girl into it," said she. "I'm an old-fashioned woman, and I don't hold with jokes of that sort."