"But do you really think he'll marry her? How could he!" said Penstemmon Fliperarde. "She's such an old fright, and such an old goose, too. And they say he's so clever."
"Why, then they'll be the goose and the sage!" laughed Prunella.
"I expect he wants her savings," said Viola Vigil, with a wise little nod.
"Or perhaps he wants to add her to his collection of antiques," tittered Ambrosine Pyepowders.
"Or to stick her up like an old sign over his dispensary!" suggested Prunella Chanticleer.
"But it's hard on Duke Aubrey," laughed Moonlove Honeysuckle, "to be cut out like this by a snuffy old doctor."
"Yes," said Viola Vigil. "My father says it's a great pity she doesn't take rooms in the Duke Aubrey's Arms, because," and Viola giggled and blushed a little, "it would be as near as she'd ever get to his arms, or to anybody else's!"
But the laughter that greeted this last sally was just a trifle shame-faced; for the Crabapple Blossoms found it a little too daring.
At the beginning of autumn, Miss Primrose suddenly sent all the servants back to their homes in distant villages; and, to the indignation of the Crabapple Blossoms, their places were filled (only temporarily, Miss Primrose maintained) by the crazy washerwoman, Mother Tibbs, and a handsome, painted, deaf-mute, with bold black eyes. Mother Tibbs made but an indifferent housemaid, for she spent most of her time at the garden gate, waving her handkerchief to the passers-by. And if, when at her work, she heard the sound of a fiddle or flute, however distant, she would instantly stop whatever she was doing and start dancing, brandishing wildly in the air broom, or warming-pan, or whatever domestic implement she may have been holding in her hands at the time.
As for the deaf-mute—she was quite a good cook, but was, perhaps, scarcely suited to employment in a young ladies' academy, as she was known in the town as "Bawdy Bess."