"Y'r honour!" Abe snatched his hoe and wheeled about sharply as the great man came down the path with Mr. Pope at his heels.
"How long have you been working here?" demanded Sir Cæsar. "Perhaps I had better have said 'idling,'" he added, with a frown and a curt nod at Tregarthen in the gateway. Sir Cæsar's gray eyebrows had a trick of bristling up, like a cat's, at the first hint of unpleasantness, even at sight of anyone who crossed his will; and they bristled now.
"'Been workin' here the best part of the morning," answered Abe, with an old man's freedom of tone and a complacent look backward at the patch of turned soil. "And 'might have been workin' yet but the children singin' their hymn yonder"—with a jerk of his thumb towards the wall that hid the school building—"warned me 'twas time to knock off for dinner."
Now, the Lord Proprietor had meant his question for preface to another. "Had Abe, while at work, caught sight of a strange lady anywhere in the garden?" The question, if put just then, and in Tregarthen's hearing, might have changed the whole current of this small history; for Tregarthen was a poor hand at dissimulation—or, rather, was incapable of it. But the sight of his back, as he turned away, caused Sir Cæsar's eyebrows to bristle up yet more pugnaciously.
"Hi, sir?"
Tregarthen turned slowly.
"You are waiting here to fetch your children from school, I suppose?"
"Yes," said Tregarthen.
"And isn't that an instance, man, of what I tried to make you understand two days ago? Cannot you see what time and trouble you'll be saving yourself—let alone the children—when you're comfortably settled on Brefar and within half-a-mile of a handy school?"
"Yes," said Tregarthen again. His eyes met the Lord Proprietor's without servility as without disrespect, but with a kind of patient wonder.