It was Nelly Polwhele who demanded to be let into the secret of the merriment so soon as she had returned to the room with Susan, and when the miller told her, with an illuminating wink and a shrewd nod, she laughed in so musical a note with her hands uplifted that the farmer pursed out his lips in pride at his own wit. He was not without a hope that he might find out, in the course of the evening, wherein the point of it lay.
Meantime Nelly was looking anxiously around the room.
“What's gone wrong wi' the girl?” said the miller. “Oh, I see how things be: 'tis so long since she was here the place seems strange to her. Is't not so, Nelly?”
“Partly, sir,” replied the girl. “But mainly I was looking to see where Mr. Pullsford was hiding. You can't be supping in good style and he absent.”
“Give no heed to Mr. Pullsford, whether he be here or not; spend your time in telling us where you yourself have been hiding for the past month,” cried the miller.
“She has not been hiding, she has been doing just the opposite—displaying herself to the fashionable world,” said Susan.
“Hey, what's all this?” said the miller. “You don't mean to tell us that you've been as far as Plymouth?”
“Plymouth, indeed! Prithee, where's the rank and fashion at Plymouth, sir?” cried Nelly. “Nay, sir, 'tis to the Bath I have been, as befits one in my station in life.”
“The Bath?—never,” exclaimed the miller, while the girl, lifting up her dress with a dainty finger and thumb to the extent of an inch or two, went mincing past him down the room, followed by the eyes of the blacksmith and the others of the party. “'Tis in jest you speak, you young baggage—how would such as you ever get as far as the Bath?”
“It sounds like a fancy freak, doth it not truly; and yet 'tis the sober truth,” said Nelly. “At the Bath I was, and there I kept for a full month, in the very centre core of all the grandest that the world has in store. I didn't find myself a bit out of place, I protest.”