“Well, Mister Archie Broadbent, now I comes to think on’t, I believes I ’ave. You know, mister, you wouldn’t never ’ave married me.”
“No, Sarah.”
“Well, and I’m perfectly sick o’ toilin’ up and down these stairs. That’s ’ow it is, sir.”
“Well, Sarah,” said Archie, “bring us some more nice tea, and I’ll forgive you for this once, but you mustn’t do it any more.”
It was late ere Bob and Harry went away. Archie lay back at once, and when, a few minutes after, the ex-policeman’s wife came in to see how he was, she found him sound and fast.
Archie was back again at Burley Old Farm, that is why he smiled in his dreams.
“So I’m going to be a hired man in the bush,” he said to himself next morning. “That’s a turn in the kaleidoscope of fortune.”
However, as the reader will see, it did not quite come to this with Archie Broadbent.