“So I was, and Jonathan was fairly limping, but we hev settled on t’ mill site—there’s nothing can lick Clitheroe Moor side, just where it touches the river. My land covers twenty acres of it, and on its south edge it is almost within touch of the new railway going to Leeds. Jonathan fairly shouted, as soon as we stood on it. ‘Squire,’ he said, ‘here’s a mill site in ten thousand. There cannot be a finer one found in England, and it is the varry bit of land that man Boocock wanted—and didn’t get as tha knows?’ Now I must write to Josepha, and tell her to come quickly and see it. She must bring with her also her business adviser.”
“Does tha reckon to be under thy sister?”
“Keep words like those behind thy lips, and set thy teeth for a barrier they cannot pass. We are equal partners, equal in power and profit, equal in loss or gain.” Then he was silent, and Annie understood that she had gone far enough. Yet out of pure womanly wilfulness, she answered—
“I shall not presume to speak another word about thy partner,” and Antony Annis looked at her over the rim of his tea cup, and the ready answer was on his lips, but he could not say it. Her personal beauty smote the reproving words back, her handsome air of defiance conquered his momentary flash of anger. She had her husband at her feet. She knew it, and her steady, radiant smile completed her victory. Then she leaned towards him, and he put down his cup and kissed her fondly. He had intended to say “O confound it, Annie! What’s up with thee? Can’t thou take a great kindness with anything but bitter biting words?” And what he really said was—“Oh, Annie! Annie! sweet, dear Annie!” And lo! there came no harm from this troubling of a man’s feelings, because Annie knew just how far it was safe for her to go.
This little breeze cleared the room that had been filled with unrestful and unfair suspicions all the day long. The squire suddenly found out it was too warm, and rose and opened the window. Then he asked—like a man who has just recovered himself from some mental neglect—“Wheriver hev Dick and Kitty gone to? I hevn’t seen nor heard them since I came home.”
“They went to the village before two o’clock. They went to the Methodist preacher’s house, I hev no doubt. Antony, what is to come of this foolishness? I tell thee Dick acts as never before.”
“About Faith?”
“Yes.”
“What hes he said to thee about Faith? How does he act?” asked the squire.
“He hes not said so much to me as he usually does about the girl he is carrying-on-with, but he really believes himself in love with her for iver and iver.”