"Now, it's odd, but I've always had a fancy for a garden of that sort," he responded, "if you think you can manage two of them without over-taxing yourself. I don't want to put you to additional trouble, you know. After all, that's just what I hire Peter for, isn't it?"
While the child was assuring him that Peter had neither the time nor the talent for miniature gardening, Miss Miller remarked pleasantly, as if she were visited by a brilliant idea, "You ought to make one for your mother also, Letty."
"Oh, mother doesn't want one," returned the child: "The big ones are hers, aren't they, father?" Then, as Blackburn had unfolded his paper again, she added to Caroline, with one of the mature utterances Miss Miller had called pathetic, "When you have big things you don't care for little things, do you?"
As they were finishing breakfast, Mary Blackburn dashed in from the terrace, with the Airedale terriers at her heels.
"I was afraid you'd have gone before I got back, David," she said, tossing her riding-crop and gloves on a chair, and coming over to the table. "Patrick, put the dogs out, and tell Peter to give them their breakfast." Then turning back to her brother, she resumed carelessly, "That man stopped me again—that foreman you discharged from the works."
Blackburn's brow darkened. "Ridley? I told him not to come on the place. Is he hanging about?"
"I met him in the lane. He asked me to bring a message to you. It seems he wants awfully to be reinstated. He is out of work; and he doesn't want to go North for a job."
"It's a pity he didn't think of that sooner. He has made more trouble in the plant than any ten men I've ever had. It isn't his fault that there's not a strike on now."
"I know," said Mary, "but I couldn't refuse to hear him. There's Alan now," she added. "Ask him about it."
She looked up, her face flushing with pride and happiness, as Alan Wythe opened the window. There was something free and noble in her candour. All the little coquetries and vanities of women appeared to shrivel in the white blaze of her sincerity.