"Oh, thank you, dear old Mary," said Boodles, her eyes glistening; while the bread-maker went at the dough as if she hated it. "I shall do splendidly," Boodles went on. "I have seen the landlord, and he will let me stay on. Directly the fine weather comes I shall put a card in the window, and I expect I shall get heaps of lodgers. I can cook quite well, and I'm a good manager. I ought to be able to make enough one half of the year to keep me the other half. Of course I shall only take ladies."
"Aw ees, don't ye tak' men, my dear. They'm all alike, and you'm a main cruel purty maid, though yew ha' got white and thin. If that young gentleman wi' the butiful face don't come and tak' ye, dalled if I wun't be after 'en wi' my gurt stick," cried Mary, pummelling the dough again.
"I asked you not to mention him," said Boodles miserably.
"I bain't to talk about 'en," cried Mary scornfully. "And yew bain't to think about 'en, I reckon. Aw, my dear, I've a gotten the heart of a woman, and I knows fine what yew thinks about all day, and half the night, though I mun't talk about it. I knows how yew puts out your arms and cries for 'en. Yew don't want a gurt big house like rectory, and yew don't want servants and railway travelling, but yew wants he, yew wants to hold on to 'en, and know he'm yourn, and shut your purty eyes and feel yew bain't lonesome—"
"Oh, Mary!" the child broke in, with something like a scream.
Mary left her pan and came and whitened the little girl's head with her doughy fingers, lending the bright hair a premature greyness.
"It's the loneliness," cried Boodles. "I thought it would not be so bad when I got used to it, but it's worse every day. I have to run on the moor, and make believe there is some one waiting for me when I get home. It's dreadful to feel the solitude when I go in, to find things just as I left them, to hear nothing except mice nibbling under the stairs; and then I have to go and turn on my windy organ, and try and believe I am amusing myself."
"Aw, my dear, yew mustn't talk to I so larned like. You'm as larned as Master," complained Mary.
"I'll tell you about my windy organ," Boodles went on, trying to force a little sunshine through what threatened to be steady rain. "With the wind, doors, and windows, I can play all sorts of marches. With my bedroom window open, and the door shut, the wind plays sad music, a funeral march; but when I shut my window, and open the one in the next room, it is loud and lively, like a military march. If I open the sitting-room window, and the one in the passage up-stairs, and shut all the doors, it is splendid, Mary, a coronation march. I hear the procession sweeping up-stairs, and the clapping of hands, and the crowd going to and fro, murmuring ah-ah-ah. But the best of all is when I open what was old daddy's bedroom window, and sit in my own room with the door shut, for the wind plays a wedding-march then, and I can make it loud or soft by opening and shutting my window. That is the march I play every evening till I get the shivers."
"She'm dafty getting," muttered Mary, understanding nothing of the musical principle of the little girl's amusement. "Don't ye du it, my dear," she went on. "'Twill just be making you mazed, and us will find ye jumping at the walls like a bumbledor on a window."