“The girls got hold of me, and would make me walk over with them,” said the Squire, pulling Bessie’s hair, and talking loudly. “What are you doing in the garden, eh? Your hobby, ain’t it, Mannering? I’ll lay sixpence, though, you don’t show me a finer dish of peas than we had for dinner yesterday. What were they called, Bessie? Bessie’s the one for remembering all the fine names.”
“Come and dine with us one day, and I’ll see what we can do. Will you say Thursday?—unless Miss Winifred has some engagement.”
“No,” said Winifred, with a little weariness in her voice, which Mr Mannering detected at once. “The Milmans were to have had a picnic on that day, but it is to wait.”
“Because Anthony is going away,” put in Bessie in an aggrieved tone.
“They want young Miles to marry the girl Milman, and so they can’t make enough of him,” said the Squire. “That’s the long and short of it.”
“Ah, I don’t believe he has any such notion in his head,” replied Mr Robert, manfully. “He’ll not be marrying just yet, though other people will marry him a dozen times over.”
“Perhaps not, perhaps not; I don’t know that I should expect to see him do anything so sensible. Old Milman isn’t over-troubled with brains, but they carry him along very fairly, and he’s as sound a Tory as any man in the county. It might be the making of the young fellow to marry into a good steady holdfast family like that, and get some of his harebrained notions knocked out of him,” said the Squire, who was becoming very sore with Anthony’s arguments.
“O, his notions will come all right by and by!” said Mr Robert pacifically. “People can’t all think and live in just the same grooves.”
“More’s the pity. I don’t see that the new grooves are any the better.”
“Well, perhaps sometimes they’re not so much worse as we think them. And how does Bessie get on without Miss Palmer?”