The girl listened carefully, but with growing disappointment.
Somehow the notion had arisen in her mind that there would be something important in this story—something which it would be of use to understand. But her brain could make nothing significant out of this commonplace narrative of a lockout and a threatened dispute about wages. Gradually, as she thought, two things rose as certainties upon the surface of her reflections.
“That scoundrel is to blame for both things. He advised her to avoid me, and he advised her to do this other mischief.”
“I thought you’d like to know,” Ben put in, deferentially. He felt a very humble individual indeed when his eldest daughter paced up and down and spoke in that tone.
“Yes, I’m glad I know,” she said, swiftly. She eyed her father in an abstracted way for an instant, and then added, as if thinking aloud: “Well, then, my fine gentleman, you—simply—shall—not—marry Miss Minster!”
Ben moved uneasily in his seat, as if this warning had been personally addressed to him. “It would be pretty rough, for a fact, wouldn’t it?” he said.
“Well, it won’t be at all!” she made emphatic answer.
“I don’t know as you can do much to pervent it, Jess,” he ventured to say.
“Can’t I? Cant I!” she exclaimed, with grim earnestness. “Wait and see.”
Ben had waited all his life, and he proceeded now to take her at her word, sitting very still, and fixing a ruminative gaze on the side of the little stove. “All right,” he said, wrapped in silence and the placidity of contented suspense.