Bram stood by the gate for a few seconds, with his head hung down, and a guilty, miserable look on his face. Then, as nobody came out to him, he slunk quietly away.
CHAPTER VII. BRAM’S DISMISSAL.
It was with some diffidence that Bram presented himself at the farmhouse door that evening. He went through the farmyard to the back door, and gave a modest knock. It was Joan, the servant, who opened the door to him, and Bram, as his own eyes met those of the middle-aged Yorkshire woman, had a strong sense that she read him, as he would have expressed it, “like a book.” Indeed Joan could read character in a face much more easily than she could read a printed page. Having been born long before the days of School Boards, she had been accustomed from her early youth to find her entertainment not in cheap fiction, but in the life around her; so that she was on the whole much better educated than women of her class are now, having stored her mind with the facts gained by experience and observation.
She looked at him not unkindly.
“Ah,” she began, with a nod of recognition, as if she had known him well for a year instead of now speaking to him for the first time, “Ah thowt it was you. Mister Christian he comes in by t’ front door.”
Bram did not like this comparison. It suggested, in the first place, that Joan had an instinct that there was some sort of rivalry between himself and Mr. Christian. It suggested also the basis on which they respectively stood.
“I’ve brought some things Miss Biron wanted,” he began, forgetting that he had been commissioned, not by the young lady, but by her father.
Joan smiled a broad smile of shrewd amusement. Bram wished she would mind her own business.
“Weel, here she be to see them hersen,” said she, as the inner door of the kitchen opened, and Claire came in.