Mrs. Keith no longer objected to Harebell's interest in him, and one day she was allowed to go to tea with Tom and his sister. She walked off very proudly, and was soon sitting up at a well-spread table in the little front parlour.
Miss Triggs was in deep mourning and was rather sad. Harebell was too excited to be so. She had never much cared for old Mrs. Triggs, who did not welcome her as a visitor, and made no secret of her dislike to children. And now she could not pretend to mourn for her.
"Do you know, Miss Harebell, I may be going away?" said Miss Triggs with a sigh.
"You'll have to get somebody else to make your frocks for you. I've had an offer from an uncle of ours, who is a big draper in Swansea. He wants me to go there and be one of the skirt hands, and Tom and me have been talking it over, and I think I'd like to go."
"Oh, dear! This is dreadful news," said Harebell in dismay. "And who will live in your cottage?"
"I'll give it up. I have only to give a month's notice."
"But won't Tom want it? You'll come back and live here again, won't you, Tom? I do want you so much."
"Not yet awhile, missy. I'm feelin' a bit unsettled like. True, the Squire talked about wantin' an estate carpenter now his head man be off to Canada: but that be too good a billet for me. There be a small cottage, too, for the lucky chap who gets it—"
"Oh, but what a lovely thing for you! And then you'd get a wife. Do say you would, Tom. And Fanny isn't married to anybody else, and now she's all alone, it would be just right, wouldn't it, Miss Triggs? She has lost her mother as well as you."
Miss Triggs smiled, but Tom did not. He got rather red.