She looked back towards the cottage, but though Alfred Wimple had strolled down to the gate after she had left it, his face was turned towards Liphook. There was something almost fierce in her voice as she spoke to the gardener, who was driving.
“The pony seems inclined to procrastinate—you had better chastise him.”
“They have spoiled him up at the house,” said Lucas, “till he won’t go nohow unless he gets a bit of the whip.”
“He goes very well with me,” she snapped.
“He knows your hand, most likely—they do get to know hands; do you find him shy much?”
She made no answer, but looked at the holes of the sand martens in the cutting on one side of the road—they always fascinated her—and at the bell heather, which was just beginning to show a tinge of colour. “He’s a bad ’un to shy, he is,” Lucas went on; “and he’s not particular what it’s at—wheel-barrows, and umbrellas, and perambulators, and covered carts, and tramps—he don’t like tramps, he don’t—and bicycles, and children if there’s a few of ’em together, and bits of paper on the road—he’s ready to be afraid of anything. There’s Tom Mitchell coming along with the letters—would you like to stop?”
“I do not expect any, but I may as well put the question to him,” the old lady said, very distantly, for she was of opinion that Lucas talked too much for his station. But he was not to be abashed easily.
“Them beeches is coming on,” he said. Aunt Anne looked up, but made no answer. “Everything is so late this year on account of the cold. Tom, have you got any letters for Mrs. Wimple at the cottage?”
“There’s one, I know, with a foreign postmark.” The man stopped and took a packet out of the leather wallet by his side.
Aunt Anne, leaning over the cart, saw, as he pulled out the letter with the French stamps on it for her, that there was another beneath, directed, in an illiterate-looking hand, to “A. Wimple, Esq.,” but it was a woman’s writing and it had the Liphook postmark. Her eyes flashed; she could hardly make her voice steady as she said—