'Private chaplain!' the squire growled again.
'It's you that preach this afternoon,' Janet said to Peterborough. 'Do you give us an extempore sermon?'
'You remind me, Miss Ilchester, I must look to it; I have a little trimming to do.'
Peterborough thought he might escape, but the squire arrested him.
'You'll give me five minutes before you're out of the house, please.
D' ye smoke on Sundays?'
'Not on Sundays, sir,' said Peterborough, openly and cordially, as to signify that they were of one mind regarding the perniciousness of Sunday smoking.
'See you don't set fire to my ricks with your foreign chaplain's tricks. I spied you puffing behind one t' other day. There,' the squire dispersed Peterborough's unnecessary air of abstruse recollection, 'don't look as though you were trying to hit on a pin's head in a bushel of oats. Don't set my ricks on fire—that 's all.'
'Mr. Peterborough,' my aunt Dorothy interposed her voice to soften this rough treatment of him with the offer of some hot-house flowers for his sitting-room.
' Oh, I thank you!' I heard the garlanded victim lowing as I left him to the squire's mercy.
Janet followed me out. 'It was my fault, Harry. You won't blame him, I know. But will he fib? I don't think he's capable of it, and I'm sure he can't run and double. Grandada will have him fast before a minute is over.'
I told her to lose no time in going and extracting the squire's promise that Peterborough should have his living,—so much it seemed possible to save.