"I've sold it," he said. "Sold it to your missis. For ten pounds."
He slapped his pocket and Mitchell heard the sovereigns jingle. He almost fell out of his seat.
"Sold it!—to our missis!—for ten pounds!" he exclaimed. "You—why, it weren't yours to sell!"
"Weren't it?" said the red-haired man. "Well, there you're wrong, Mestur Mitchell, 'cause it were. I knew it as soon as I set eyes on it, 'cause it had a mark in its left ear that I gave it myself. And as your missis had taken a fancy to it and bid me ten pound for it, why, of course, I took her at her word. Howsumever," he concluded, putting his hand in his pocket, "as you put me on to the matter, I'll none be unneighbourly, and I'll do the handsome by you."
Therewith he laid half-a-crown on the splashboard of the light cart, winked again, and with a cheery farewell strode away, leaving the disgusted gardener staring at the scant reward of his schemings.
CHAPTER III
THE MAN WHO WAS NOBODY
I
That was one of the finest of all the fine mornings of that wonderful spring, and Miriam Weere, when she saw the sunlight falling across the orchard in front of her cottage, and heard the swirl of the brown river mingling with the murmur of the bees in their hives under the apple-trees, determined to do her day's work out of doors. The day's work was the washing of the week's soiled linen, and no great task for a strapping young woman of five-and-twenty, whose arms were as muscular as her gipsy-coloured face was handsome. Miriam accordingly made no haste in beginning it—besides, there was the eighteen-months-old baby to wash and dress and feed. He woke out of a morning sleep as she finished her breakfast, and began to make loud demands upon her. She busied herself with him for the next hour, laughing to herself gleefully over his resemblance to his father, big blue-eyed, blonde-haired Michael; and then, carrying him out to the daisy-spangled grass of the orchard, she set him down beneath an apple-tree, and left him grasping at the white and gold and green about him while she set out her wash-tubs a few yards away.
Miriam Weere had never a care in the world. Her glossy hair, dark as the plumage on a rook's breast, her clear hazel eyes, her glowing cheeks, the round, full curves of her fine figure, combined with the quickness and activity of her movements to prove her in possession of rude and splendid health. There was only another human being in Ashdale who could compete with her in the appearance of health or in good looks—her husband, Michael, a giant of well over six feet, who, like herself, had never known what it was to have a day's illness. The life of these two in their cottage by the little Ash was one perpetual round of good humour, good appetite, and sound sleep. Nor was there any reason why they should take thought for the morrow—that is, unduly. Higher up the valley, set on a green plateau by the bank of the river, stood Ashdale Mill, between the upper and nether stones of which most of the grain grown in the neighbourhood passed. And Ashdale Mill was the property of Tobias Weere, Michael's father, who was well known to be a rich man, and some day Michael would have——