“’Twould serve him right,” the woman thoughtfully muttered, with a vicious gleam in her eyes and a backward glance over her shoulder toward the veranda, where she knew the squire was sitting absorbed in his evening paper. The next minute she had changed the tags on the goods!
“Mebbe ’twon’t amount to anythiny, but I’ll resk it, and if I git caught I’ll pay for it out o’ my own pocket,” she whispered; “that boy desarves the best that can be had, and I only hope that fortune’ll favor the trick.”
Then she laid the samples on the squire’s desk, where she thought he could not fail to see them when he sat down to it, after which she went back to her work, a curious smile wreathing her thin lips.
An hour later Squire Talford lighted the student-lamp and turned to the table for his samples, for he was about to write his order to the tailor.
Of course, he did not find them, and, going to the door leading into the kitchen, he inquired:
“Maria, where are those pieces of cloth I left on the table at supper-time?”
The woman was paring apples for the morrow’s baking.
“I put ’em on your desk,” she replied, in a matter-of-fact tone, but with her mouth full of apple and a very red face, too, if he could but have seen it.
“Oh!” said the squire, with an inflection which intimated that he might have known where they were if he had stopped to think. He found them, and, seating himself at his desk, he wrote his order to the tailor.
The following is an exact copy of his letter when it was finished: