“I’m not goin’,” rejoined Kershaw firmly.
“Nay, but you are,” responded Jinny, uplifting her voice. “’Tis the rule o’ the house. I’ve never had a lodger yet as didn’t go to church.”
“Yo’ll have one now, then,” retorted Luke, tapping the ashes out of his pipe and rising.
“There’s sausages for breakfast to-morrow,” remarked Jinny, with apparent irrelevance.
Luke burst out laughing:—
“Yo’ think I’m a child, I doubt,” he said. “No breakfast for a bad lad. Well, it won’t hurt me to go wi’out my breakfast for once. I’m not goin’ to church—I tell yo’ plain. Yo’ have yo’r rules an’ I have mine. I fell out wi’ a parson once as took on hissel’ to interfere wi’ me, an’ I says to him what I says to yo’—‘I’ll never set foot ’ithin a church again’—an’ I wunnot.”
He got up and went out of the room, slamming the door behind him. Jinny was nonplussed for once; but nevertheless, following her elementary mode of procedure, prepared such an appetising breakfast on the following morning, as she hoped would touch the heart of even the most hardened sinner. Luke, however, did not put himself in the way of being softened; he rose even earlier than his landlady; dressed himself sullenly in his working-clothes, and went off for a solitary ramble along the shore.
The Rector met Miss Whiteside on her way to church.
“What, only one companion!” he cried, laughing.
“Only one, sir,” said Jinny, dropping a staid curtsey.