“Shouldn’t think o’ doing,” answered the clothier.
“Come, you know the sort as ’ill serve me. Shilling a yard at best. If you’ve any at eightpence—”
“Haven’t.”
“Well, then I reckon I must go a bit higher.”
“We’ve as good a kersey at elevenpence,” broke in Mrs Clere, “as you’d wish to see, Alice Mount, of a summer day. A good brown, belike, and not one as ’ll fade—and a fine thread—for the price, you know. You don’t look for kersey at elevenpence to be even with that at half-a-crown, now, do you? but you’ll never repent buying this, I promise you.”
Mrs Clere was not by any means a woman of few words. While she was talking her husband had taken down the kersey, and opened it out upon the counter.
“There!” said he gruffly: “take it or leave it.”
There were two other women in the shop, to whom Mrs Clere was showing some coarse black stockings: they looked like mother and daughter. While Alice Mount was looking at the kersey, the younger of these two said to the other—
“Isn’t that Alice Mount of Bentley?—she that was had to London last August by the Sheriffs for heresy, with a main lot more?”
“Ay, ’tis she,” answered the mother in an undertone.