"And what would you be thinkin' to do wid thim?" she asked presently in a new and more personal tone.
Milbanke did not answer at once. His eyes strayed uneasily from one object in the yard to another, while the frown of perplexity that had puckered his brow since Asshlin's death reappeared more prominently than before. At last, with a certain expression of puzzled resolution, he looked up and met Hannah's attentive gaze.
"To tell you the truth, Hannah," he said, "that is the precise question I have been asking myself ever since your poor master died."
There was a wait of some seconds while his listener digested the information; then she nodded her head with slow impressiveness.
"I seen it meself," she said again. "Sure, I seen it as plain as daylight. 'There's somethin' on his mind,' I says to meself. An' if it isn't the poor masther's death,' I says, 'thin it's nothin' more nor less than the natural feelin's of a single gentleman that finds himself wid two grown daughters.'"
It was characteristic of Milbanke that he did not smile. He recognised only one fact in the old servant's words—the fact that the state of affairs over which he had been worrying in lonely perplexity had suddenly been accurately, if roughly, voiced by some one else. He glanced up with quick relief into the round, red face framed in the dairy window.
"Hannah," he said honestly, "your surmise was perfectly correct."
For the first time a smile broke over her tear-stained face.
"I was right thin? 'Tis the children was troublin' you?"
A sharp gleam of inquiry shot from her eyes.