"Have your own way,—have your own way, Miss," wheezed Darby, irritably. And it struck her that there was the soupçon of a threat in his narrow little eyes as he added,—
"Maybe you won't get off so aisy next time he meets you! If ye will be said and led by me, ye will not be going about alone afther dusk. And mind, if anything happens, and ye are found with the print of five black fingers on your neck"—spreading out his own horny digits by way of illustration—"and stretched as dead as a doornail, don't go and say afterwards that ye waren't warned."
With this remarkable caution, Darby hitched his coat over his shoulder, nodded his head impressively, and then turning to Dido, said,—
"I'll be up about them pigs this evening, Miss; but you need not be laying out to get a heavy price for them! I'm for my dinner now," and with an abrupt nod, Mr. Chute plodded off.
"I'm sure you are shocked at his free-and-easy ways, Helen—at all their free-and-easy ways!" exclaimed Dido. "But they mean no incivility, and they take an interest in the——"
"Yes, Darby, I can see, is very anxious that I should not put myself in the way of being strangled by John Dillon. Really, it will be quite exciting to go out after dark."
"And the only excitement we can offer you. You have no idea what a quiet place you have come to," said Katie; "we have no society at all. Papa never returned people's visits, or answered their invitations. He never goes out, excepting about the place, in the dusk; he is entirely buried in his experiments. People have all sorts of ideas about us; they think that the Padré practises the black art, and that Dido and I keep pigs in the parlour, and a threshing-machine in the back hall!"
Helen laughed aloud at this description. If Crowmore was shabby, it was beautifully clean; and if her cousins occasionally used the first thing to hand instead of a regulation implement, the interior of the house was not merely neat, but tasteful.
"Of course, that's an exaggeration," said Dido. "But no one calls here, excepting the rector, Barry, and old Mr. Redmond. He comes from mere idle curiosity, to see if we are all alive and the house not burnt down—he said so! He and papa fought frantically about a Greek word the only time they ever met. We tried to cut him, he was so awfully rude to the Padré; but he would not see it, and he comes here, and sends us books, and baskets of hot-house fruit and flowers, and fish and game. We call it Mr. Redmond's out-door relief. He is a kind-hearted old man!"
"And does he live alone?"