“Fishpingle—that’s a whopper, too. I’m not quite the innocent fool I was. Men serve others, cheerfully enough, if they’re the right sort, but they do it because they have to. I never met a fellow yet, old or young, who didn’t want to be his own, if he could manage it. I supposed that you couldn’t manage it. But you can. More, you could have managed it long ago. That’s as clear as our water is to-day.”
“I wanted to stay on.”
“But why—why?”
“This is my home, Master Lionel.”
“You’re a wily old trout, you are. But it isn’t your home. If anything happened to father and me, where would you be? You ought to have married and had some jolly kids. Nether-Applewhite is famous for its pretty girls.”
Fishpingle was cornered, but his humour rescued him. He said slyly:
“Pretty, yes; but not very highly educated, Master Lionel.”
“I see. We’re getting to grips now. My great-grandmother, so I have heard, made a bit of a pet of you. She saw to it that you got a better education than our girls. Obviously, she intended you to profit by that and cut loose. For some inscrutable reason you didn’t. If that education, old chap, made a bachelor of you, it was rather a questionable blessing, eh?”
“Perhaps.”
Fishpingle’s face had assumed the impenetrable mask of the highly trained English servant. Lionel glanced at him.