‘Oh, fie! that looks as if you were sorry that you have been compelled to help me,’ said the old lady, laughing.
Poor Mr. Peters had not the least idea how to take this banter. He thought he had done or said something wrong. He coloured up to the respectable tall hat that shaded his sober brows; but she stopped his troubled explanations summarily.
‘Where were you going? It does not matter? Well, you shall come in with me, and Morris will give you some tea. You can tell me about your school—I am always interested in my neighbours’ concerns. You pass this way most evenings, don’t you? I see you passing. You always take a walk after your day’s work—a very wholesome custom. And then your evenings—where do you spend your evenings? Are there any nice people who give you a cup of tea? Do you go and see your friends? Yes, I am interested, always interested, to learn how my fellow-creatures get through their life; I don’t do much myself but look on, now-a-days. And you know life’s a strange sort of thing,’ said the old lady. ‘Nothing interests me so much. It isn’t a line of great events, as we think in our youth—the intervals are more important than the events. Are you dull, eh? You are a stranger in this place. How do you spend your evenings after you go in?’
‘Madam, there is always plenty to do,’ said Mr. Peters; ‘a master can never be said to have much leisure.’ And then he unbent from that high seriousness and said, with a mixture of confused grandeur and wistfulness, ‘In the circles to which I have admission there is not much that can be called society. I have to spend my evenings at home, or——’
‘Or——?’ said Mrs. Mowbray. ‘Just so, that is the whole business; alone, or—— But where is the ‘or’? So am I. I am alone (which I generally like best), or—I have friends with me. Friends—I call them friends for want of a better word—the people on the Green. They bore me, but I like them sometimes. Now, you are a young man. Tell me what ‘or’ commends itself to you.’
Thus exhorted, Mr. Peters hung down his head; he stammered in his reply. ‘I am afraid, madam, you would think but badly of me if you knew: without knowing why. I go and sit down there—in front of Mrs. Aikin’s house.’
‘In front of the Barley Mow! Dear me!’ she said, with well-acted surprise; ‘that is not the thing for a schoolmaster to do!’
‘I know it, madam,’ said Mr. Peters with a sigh.
‘Ah!’ said Mrs. Mowbray, with the air of one who is making an important discovery; ‘ah! I divine you at last. It is a girl that beguiles you to the Barley Mow! Then it must be a good girl, for they allow no one else there. Bless me! I wonder if it should be Jane!’
‘You know her, madam?’