“Better let her think I am offended now,” he muttered. “It is the best move I can make;” and he went straight back to the station, so for the present Hazel saw him no more, and to her great relief.
Percy only came to the cottage once a week, saying that Mr William Forth Burge kept him hard at work writing, and he should be very glad to get a post somewhere in town, for he was sick of Plumton, it was so horribly slow, and Mr William Forth Burge was such a dreadful cad.
Percy’s stay proved to be shorter than he expected, for at the end of a month he was one morning marched up to Ardley, and brought face to face with George Canninge, who was quiet and firm with him, asking him a few sharp questions, and ending by giving him a couple of five-pound notes and a letter to a shipping firm in London, the head of which firm told him to come into the office the very next day, and was very short, but informed him that his salary as clerk would begin at once at sixty pounds a year, and that if he did his duty he should rise.
Chapter Thirty One.
Another Trouble.
It was, some will say, a childish, old-fashioned way of keeping cash, but all the same it was the plan adopted by Hazel, who every week dropped the amounts she had received from the school pence, after changing the coppers into silver, through the large slit of an old money-box that had been given her when a child. It was a plain, oak-wood box, with ordinary lock and key, and the slit at the top was large enough to admit of each week’s shillings and sixpences being tied up in note-paper, in the ladylike way adopted by the fair sex—that is to say, a neat packet is made and tied up with cotton. After the tying up Hazel used to put the amount it contained upon the packet, enter the said amount in a memorandum-book, drop the packet through the slit, and lock up the drawer in which the box reposed.
During the early portion of her stay at Plumton, as previously shown, Mr Chute went on changing the pence for her from copper to silver, but after a time Hazel felt a certain amount of diffidence in charging the schoolmaster with the task, and made an arrangement with the grocer and draper of the place, who readily made the exchange.
Then there was the monthly payment to the blanket fund, which was also placed in the same receptacle, after being duly noted; and there were times when Hazel thought that it would be a good thing when she could get rid of an amount that was rather a burden to her, and she even went so far as to think that she would ask Mr William Forth Burge to take charge of the amount, but for certain reasons she declined.