“But she hasn’t been brought up to farming, father,” suggested Patty.
“That beant it, gell. She be mean and close-fisted like her brother. Do you know what she did?”
“No.”
“She watered the men’s beer when she sent it out to ’em in the hay harvest. Why, if you put one drop of water into beer it’s spoilt directly. It is so different to spirits. She ought to have been made to drink it.” The farmer paused suddenly, and then said, in a lower tone, “but here, as I’m alive, comes the very man hisself. I say, Patty, can’t ’ee manage to chuck him off somehow? I can’t send him away, and it gives me the sick every time as I sees him.”
She answered with a cunning little smile. Her father went out into the fields, and Mr. Nettlethorpe found Patty alone in the parlour, sewing.
He stammered a good morning, and sat down clumsily on a chair.
Nettlethorpe, the miser-farmer, as he was called—for in many respects he resembled the far-famed old Elwes—was a tall meagre-looking man with bright red hair.
He carried pinch and starve in broad letters upon his features, which were angular, and also on his clothes which were patched and threadbare.
“Are you not well, Mr. Nettlethorpe?” inquired Patty, with an appearance of interest, as she saw her visitor shifting about on his seat as uneasily as if he had been on the top of a kitchen oven.
“Quite well, thank you. The fact is, I—I came over to—to see you.”