"We will keep it dark till the house is quiet," said the landlord.
"Ay," said she: "but meantime prithee give me linen to hem, or work to do: for the time hangs on me like lead."
Her betrothed's eye brightened at this house-wifely request, and he brought her up two dozen flagons of various sizes to clean and polish.
She gathered complacency as she reflected that by a strange turn of fortune all this bright pewter was to be hers.
And this mighty furbishing up of pewter reminds me that justice requires me to do a stroke of the same work.
Well then, the deposition, read out in the alderman's room as Manon's, was not so exact as such things ought to be. The alderman had condensed her evidence. Now there are in every great nation about three persons capable of condensing evidence without falsifying it: but this alderman was not one of that small band. In the first part of the deposition he left out as unimportant these words "my mother advised me to keep out of his way till his wrath should cool."
Between the words "jealous of me" and "the reason" Manon had said "My master was aye at my heels: so I told my mistress, and said I would rather go than be cause of mischief." This the alderman suppressed as mere babel: whereas it was a worthy trait. He also let slip the word "afterwards" in the next sentence. Manon had said the reason they gave afterwards, i. e., "when I was no longer there to contradict them." And so on all through the deposition.
Sometimes the deponent suffered as many a one does now-a-days, in the newspaper and other reports, by the mere suppression of the question. For instance this is what actually was said:—
The Alderman. "Come now, should you have interfered if this soldier had had no beard?"
Manon. "How can I tell what I should have done?"