"I want no thanks for being just," she remarked coldly. "What you have to do is to clear your name by searching for these thieves."
"How am I to do that?"
"I leave it to your own cleverness. Meanwhile I shall see Mr. Jabez, and get him to advance us sufficient to live on until your name is cleared and you have got another situation. As to this girl, Lesbia, give her up."
"Never! Never! Never!" said George. His mother looked at him coldly and disapprovingly, and left him in silence.
But matters turned out as she wished. Within three days a tearful note came from a distraught girl to her anxious lover--a note of a few words--"I believe you to be innocent but we can never marry, and we must never meet again," said the note, and it was signed stiffly "Lesbia Hale."
[CHAPTER IX]
TWO GIRLS
If the course of true love did not run smoothly with George, the girl he loved found it speeding roughly also.
Lesbia was as anxious to see her lover as he was to meet her; but parental displeasure and parental authority stood like a wall between this new Pyramus and Thisbe--a wall which could by no means be overleaped.
As Tim had informed George, his master had engaged Mrs. Petty as a housekeeper, and so the domestic arrangements of Rose Cottage were temporarily removed from the hands of Lesbia. Also, in conjunction with The Shadow, Mrs. Petty acted both as a spy and a gaoler. It was infamous, as Lesbia felt, that she should be watched in this fashion; but as she had no money and no friends and no place whither she could go, there was nothing left for it but to wait, until such time as Mr. Hale became more reasonable.