"Mr. Fenwick, if you tells me to go to—to—to,"—he was going to mention some very bad place, but was restrained by the parson's presence,—"if you tells me to go anywheres, I'll go."
"That's right. Then I tell you to go to the mill."
"I don't know as father'll let me in," said he, almost breaking into sobs as he spoke.
"That he will, heartily. Do you tell him that you had a word or two with me here, and that I'll come up and call on him to-morrow." Then he put his hand into his pocket, and whispering something, offered the lad money. But Sam turned away, and shook his head, and walked off. "I don't believe that that fellow had any more to do with it than you or I," said Fenwick.
"I don't know what to believe," said Gilmore. "Have you heard that the Marquis is in the town? Greenthorne just told me so."
"Then I had better get out of it, for Heytesbury isn't big enough for the two of us. Come, you've done here, and we might as well jog home."
Gilmore dined at the Vicarage that evening, and of course the day's work was discussed. The quarrel, too, which had taken place at the farmhouse had only yet been in part described to Mrs. Fenwick. "Do you know I feel half triumphant and half frightened," Mrs. Fenwick said to the Squire. "I know that the Marquis is an old fool, imperious, conceited, and altogether unendurable when he attempts to interfere. And yet I have a kind of feeling that because he is a Marquis, and because he owns two thousand and so many acres in the parish, and because he lives at Turnover Park, one ought to hold him in awe."
"Frank didn't hold him in awe yesterday," said the Squire.
"He holds nothing in awe," said the wife.
"You wrong me there, Janet. I hold you in great awe, and every lady in Wiltshire more or less;—and I think I may say every woman. And I would hold him in a sort of awe, too, if he didn't drive me beyond myself by his mixture of folly and pride."