Adam released Dinah’s hand as he ceased speaking, and was expecting an answer, but before she had opened her lips Mrs. Poyser said, “Look there now! I told you there was folks enow t’ help i’ this parish, wi’out going further off. There’s Mrs. Bede getting as old and cas’alty as can be, and she won’t let anybody but you go a-nigh her hardly. The folks at Snowfield have learnt by this time to do better wi’out you nor she can.”
“I’ll put my bonnet on and set off directly, if you don’t want anything done first, Aunt,” said Dinah, folding up her work.
“Yes, I do want something done. I want you t’ have your tea, child; it’s all ready—and you’ll have a cup, Adam, if y’ arena in too big a hurry.”
“Yes, I’ll have a cup, please; and then I’ll walk with Dinah. I’m going straight home, for I’ve got a lot o’ timber valuations to write out.”
“Why, Adam, lad, are you here?” said Mr. Poyser, entering warm and coatless, with the two black-eyed boys behind him, still looking as much like him as two small elephants are like a large one. “How is it we’ve got sight o’ you so long before foddering-time?”
“I came on an errand for Mother,” said Adam. “She’s got a touch of her old complaint, and she wants Dinah to go and stay with her a bit.”
“Well, we’ll spare her for your mother a little while,” said Mr. Poyser. “But we wonna spare her for anybody else, on’y her husband.”
“Husband!” said Marty, who was at the most prosaic and literal period of the boyish mind. “Why, Dinah hasn’t got a husband.”
“Spare her?” said Mrs. Poyser, placing a seed-cake on the table and then seating herself to pour out the tea. “But we must spare her, it seems, and not for a husband neither, but for her own megrims. Tommy, what are you doing to your little sister’s doll? Making the child naughty, when she’d be good if you’d let her. You shanna have a morsel o’ cake if you behave so.”
Tommy, with true brotherly sympathy, was amusing himself by turning Dolly’s skirt over her bald head and exhibiting her truncated body to the general scorn—an indignity which cut Totty to the heart.