"Whatever put that idea into your head?" asked the Spawer, in surprise.
"You," said Jeff, with forceful directness. "It was you telt me."
"I? How wicked of me to tell such a story," the Spawer said warmly.
"Ah do believe you 're gannin' after some young lady or other," Jeff declared, by a quick inspiration.
"How dare you," said the Spawer, rising from the bed in protest, "try to put such ideas into the head of an innocent young man, old enough to be your father. Hither with the razor at once," he commanded, "and let 's shave your head."
But inside, out of sight behind all this laughter, he sent a knowing, sagacious glance to his soul.
"The young divil!" he said.
He shaved, like the Chinese executioners, with despatch; whistled blithely through his bath as though he were a linnet hung out in the sun, and was downstairs as soon as might be. The little room greeted him cheerfully in its cool breakfast array, holding forth a great, heavenly-scented garland of wall-flowers and sweet-williams and mignonette—for all the world like some dear, diminutive, old-fashioned damsel in white muslin—and his eye softened unconsciously to an appreciative smile. There, too, was the sofa consecrate to Dixon. He looked at it with a more conscious extension of smile—thinking, no doubt, of Dixon. Then he shook the bell for breakfast, being an-hungered, and smelling the mushrooms.
The door flew wide to Miss Bates' determined toe, as she entered with the mushrooms in company with the bacon and toast and steaming hot milk and coffee on the big, battered tray of black Japan, securely held at either foremost corner with a salmon-colored fist.
Now Miss Bates was Dixon's orphan niece, whose case deserves all the pity you can afford to give it, as we shall see. Left quite alone in the world by the death of her father (who had no more thought for her future than to fall off his horse, head downwards, in the dark), she was most cruelly abducted by her wicked uncle to Cliff Wrangham (much against her will—and his own), and imprisoned there under the humiliating necessity of having to work like one of the family. You must not call her the scullery-maid or the dairy-maid or the kitchen-maid, but rather, with the blood-right to give back word for word and go about her day's work grumbling, you must appoint her a place among the ranks of unhappy heroines—reduced, distressed, and down-trodden beneath the iron-shod heel of labor. She was, indeed, the persecuted damosel of mediæval romance, brought up to modern weight and size and standard—not the least of her many afflictions being that she was forcibly christened Mary Anne by heartless parents, while yet a helpless infant, and that nobody called her anything else. Her lips were full of prophetic utterances as to last straws; as to what certain people (not so very many miles away) would find for themselves one morning (not so very far ahead) when they got up and came downstairs, and said, "Where 's somebody?" and never an answer, and no need to say then they were sorry, as if they had n't been warned!