“Good morning, Sam,” said Mrs. Jebb, immensely condescending.
“Good morning, ’m,” said Sam, humbly respectful, with an ingenuous air of being grateful for such a lady’s notice; but his brain was working like a steam engine. How was he to begin?
Then Fate helped him, as she does, perversely, such people, while she leaves deserving objects like you and me severely alone.
“Mr. Deane says you may drive me into Bardswell this morning, if you will. Mrs. Dixon and the young ladies are coming to supper after the harvest festival to-morrow night, and there is no whisky in the house—Mrs. Dixon takes whisky for her gout—and we want various other little things.”
“How many bottles are you to get?”
“Er—two,” said Mrs. Jebb, whose dignified coldness intimated that it was no business of his.
Then Sam came a little nearer and spoke earnestly to Mrs. Jebb under the apple tree, and Mrs. Jebb appeared at first annoyed, then interested, then righteously indignant, finally in a state of fluttered adventurousness, for through this stirring, sparkling day she too was going forth to do something desperate for the sake of Romance, and it made her feel agitatedly splendid.
Really she was going to give Sam the second bottle of Andy’s whisky, presuming on the safe assumption that only one would be required and that he would forget all about the other. But it was a reckless and daring deed for one who had taken through life the motto of her pinafore days: “It is a sin to steal a pin, and much more so a greater thing.”
Her mother had worked that on a sampler and, incidentally, on Mrs. Jebb’s soul—as mothers did in the dark days before we all grew too clever to work samplers.
So no wonder that, having so given herself away to Sam, she should try to take a little back with a final—