She was awakened by being shaken pretty roughly, while a voice cried close to her ear:
“Now, then, I’ve got you; and if I let you get home with a whole bone in your little thievish body, you may think yourself jolly lucky, I can tell you.”
Having recognised the voice as Dick’s, Freda was not alarmed by the assumed ferocity of his tone. Besides, he had evidently mistaken her for somebody else. So she shook herself free from the hay, and sat up and looked at him. By that time he had got used to the gloom of the loft, and to her surprise, he drew back so quickly that he risked falling off the ladder. A little more contemplation, and then he murmured:
“Of course—it’s the hair!”
The net in which, in primitive fashion, she was accustomed to tuck away her hair, had been lost in her tumble through the roof, and her red-brown locks, which had a pretty, natural wave, had fallen about her ears and given to her pale face quite a new character. Dick, however, was not a young fellow looking idly at a pretty girl, but a man full of responsibilities and anxieties.
“You said last night,” he began abruptly, “that you had heard something at the ‘Barley Mow’ about us and your father. What was it?”
She answered in a low, modest voice, but without any fear.
“You say my father is quarrelling with you. You wish to find out all his movements. Then if I tell you about them, I am betraying my own father!”
“I warn you that your principles won’t agree with his any more than they do with mine. Do as you would be done by is what you were taught at the convent, I suppose. Do as you are done by is the motto we live by here.”
“It seems very dreadful,” whispered Freda, “to do things that are wrong and not to mind!”