“I hope so too; but I can’t say yet. Quarrel about a girl,—eh?”
“It was not about money. And I suppose if there were no money and no women in the world, there would be no quarrels and very few doctors. Good-night, Sir.”
“It is a strange thing to me,” said Kenelm, as he now opened the garden-gate of Mr. Saunderson’s homestead, “that though I’ve had nothing to eat all day, except a few pitiful sandwiches, I don’t feel the least hungry. Such arrest of the lawful duties of the digestive organs never happened to me before. There must be something weird and ominous in it.”
On entering the parlour, the family party, though they had long since finished supper, were still seated round the table. They all rose at the sight of Kenelm. The fame of his achievements had preceded him. He checked the congratulations, the compliments, and the questions which the hearty farmer rapidly heaped upon him, with a melancholic exclamation, “But I have lost my appetite! No honours can compensate for that. Let me go to bed peaceably, and perhaps in the magic land of sleep Nature may restore me by a dream of supper.”
CHAPTER XIV.
KENELM rose betimes the next morning somewhat stiff and uneasy, but sufficiently recovered to feel ravenous. Fortunately, one of the young ladies, who attended specially to the dairy, was already up, and supplied the starving hero with a vast bowl of bread and milk. He then strolled into the hayfield, in which there was now very little left to do, and but few hands besides his own were employed. Jessie was not there. Kenelm was glad of that. By nine o’clock his work was over, and the farmer and his men were in the yard completing the ricks. Kenelm stole away unobserved, bent on a round of visits. He called first at the village shop kept by Mrs. Bawtrey, which Jessie had pointed out to him, on pretence of buying a gaudy neckerchief; and soon, thanks to his habitual civility, made familiar acquaintance with the shopwoman. She was a little sickly old lady, her head shaking, as with palsy, somewhat deaf, but still shrewd and sharp, rendered mechanically so by long habits of shrewdness and sharpness. She became very communicative, spoke freely of her desire to give up the shop, and pass the rest of her days with a sister, widowed like herself, in a neighbouring town. Since she had lost her husband, the field and orchard attached to the shop had ceased to be profitable, and become a great care and trouble; and the attention the shop required was wearisome. But she had twelve years unexpired of the lease granted for twenty-one years to her husband on low terms, and she wanted a premium for its transfer, and a purchaser for the stock of the shop. Kenelm soon drew from her the amount of the sum she required for all,—L45.
“You be n’t thinking of it for yourself?” she asked, putting on her spectacles, and examining him with care.
“Perhaps so, if one could get a decent living out of it. Do you keep a book of your losses and your gains?”
“In course, sir,” she said proudly. “I kept the books in my goodman’s time, and he was one who could find out if there was a farthing wrong, for he had been in a lawyer’s office when a lad.”