“Let her come over to me, and we will arrange that,” Miss Ormson answered; and accordingly, when Prissy came, out of her own wardrobe the young lady furnished that of the new servant—telling her at the same time, laughingly, she was “made up for life.”
“And you may think yourself a lucky gal,” remarked the mother on the first Sunday when Priscilla went home, about a month after her entrance on her duties at Berrie Down—“having plenty of victuals, and good clothes to your back, and a kind mistress.”
John Dobbin was sitting in the porch during this colloquy, looking askance at his daughter’s finery the while. When she came to exhibit her new dress to him, he observed, first, that “fine feathers didn’t make fine birds,” and then inquired—
“Who was that chap I saw thee talking to last evening, this side Moorlands?”
“I warn’t out yesterday evening, father,” answered the girl.
“Warn’t thou?”
“No,” was the reply.
“Thou mayn’t have told a lie about that half-a-crown piece, but I doubt thou’rt telling a lie now, my lass,” he said.
“Well, you can ask Mrs. Dudley if I went out yesterday,” retorted Prissy, defiantly.
“I take it Madam Dudley has something else to do than watch the coming and going of a wench like thou,” he answered; “mayhap she don’t know the one-half of what anybody in the house does; but I can tell thee this much, Prissy—that if I catches thee going wrong, I’ll break every bone in thy body, if it was covered an inch thick with silks and satins.”