“Ye sly thing!” she burst out suddenly. “Lard! I wouldn’t be so treecherous—that I wouldn’t; running after en afore my very eyes. Get along with ’ee, do. I’ll have nothin’ more to say to ’ee.”
Lizzie stared for a moment, thunderstruck, her usually rosy face turning quite pale, and tears presently rushing to her eyes.
“Well, Susan,” she said, as soon as she had recovered her breath, “I didn’t think it of ’ee to turn on me so sudden. I never did nothin’ but what was for yer good. I thought it ’ud plaze ye. But there, you can manage en for yourself now. I don’t care if Tom Locke doesn’t get no new eye at all.”
She hurried from the room, leaving Susan convulsively choking and sobbing.
“Dear heart! dear heart! she’s took wi’ the westeria again,” groaned Mrs. Adlam, as she went creaking up the stairs.
But little Lizzie made no response. Her cheeks were red enough now, and she metaphorically shook the dust of the Adlam premises from her feet as she closed the garden gate behind her.
She kept religiously away from her former friend throughout the week, but when Sunday came round that young lady actually condescended to pay her a visit. Susan arrived attired in white, with a wreath of daisies round her hat, and a great bunch of monthly roses in her waistband; the coils of her fair hair shone like gold in the sunlight—she was a harmony of white and pink and yellow, very pleasant to behold, particularly as her face was flushed with unwonted excitement, and her eyes were bright and eager.
Lizzie received her in the orchard, where she was feeding the chickens. She was not yet dressed for the afternoon, it being her mother’s turn to go to church, and various household duties falling in consequence to her share to-day; but she had put on the clean print which was to serve her throughout the coming week, and a big white apron over that. Her curly brown hair was plaited very neatly, and her sleeves rolled up high on her firm plump arms. The sun glanced down through the heavily laden apple boughs upon her active little figure as she flitted from one hen-coop to another dispensing handfuls of yellow meal to the half-fledged chickens that ran in and out between the bars; her bright tin bucket glittered in the rays, and the little brown tendrils on her forehead danced up and down with the rapidity of her movements.
“Oh, Lizzie, I’ve such a piece of news for you!”