"Has he?" said Tilda disingenuously.
But she was jealous already, and by habit distrustful of her sex.
"Didn't you know? I noticed it, just now, when he was stripped. And I thought for a moment . . . you two coming and asking for Sir Miles. . . . But I'm always supposing some secret or other. Mother says it comes of muzzing my head with books, and then putting two and two together and making 'em five. . . . It's fanciful, of course"—here Chrissy sighed—"things don't happen like that in real life. . . . But there's always been stories about Sir Miles; and when I saw the mark—it is queer, now—"
But Tilda kept a steady face, her eyes fixed on the escutcheon.
"What does it mean?" she asked. "I don't know about these things."
"Why it's Sir Miles's coat-of-arms; of the Chandons, that is. Inistow Farm used to belong to them—belonged to them for hundreds of years, right down to the time Miss Sally bought it. Father farmed it under them for thirty years before that, and his father, and his grandfather, and his great-greats—back ever so long. He was terribly put out when it changed hands; but now he says 'Thank the Lord' when he talks of it."
"Changed hands?" Tilda found herself echoing.
"Yes. Inistow has belonged to Miss Sally these five years now. I thought maybe you'd be knowing all about her and Sir Miles—coming like this and inquiring for them. She's a good one, is Miss Sally; but when a woman sees a man poor—well, of course, that's her revenge."
"Is—is Sir Miles poor?"
Tilda's hopes were tottering, falling about her, she hardly knew how or why. Vaguely she had been building up a fabric of hope that she was helping Arthur Miles home to a splendid inheritance. Such things happened, almost as a matter of course, in the penny fiction to which her reading had been exclusively confined. To be sure, they never happened—they were wildly unlikely to happen—in the world of her own limited experience. But in the society to which the boy belonged by his gentle manners and his trick of speech, which could only come as a birthright—in that rarefied world where the ladies wore low gowns, with diamonds around their necks, and the gentlemen dined in fine linen with wide shirt-fronts—all life moved upon the machinery of romance. The books said so; and after that romance she had been pursuing, by degrees more consciously, from fugitive hints almost to certainty that a few hours would give it into her grasp. And now—