“That ’s the one case,” answered Janice, sagely.
“But things like it are very common in novels,” insisted Tabitha. “And what is more likely for a man disappointed in love than, in desperation, to indenture himself?”
“I can easily credit a female of taste—yes, any female— refusing the ill-mannered, bold-staring rogue,” said Janice, giving the coarse osnaburg shirt she was working upon a fretted jerk; “but to suppose him to be capable of a grand, devoted passion is as bad as expecting—expecting faithfulness in a dog like Clarion.”
“Clarion?” questioned Tabitha.
“Yes. Have n’t you seen how—how—that he—the man, has taken possession of him? Thomas says the two sneak off together every chance they get, and sometimes are n’t back till eleven or twelve. I wish dadda would put a stop to it. Like as not, ’t is for pilfering they are bound.” Miss Meredith began anew on the buttonhole, and had she been thrusting her needle into either man or dog, she could not have sewed with a more vicious vigour.
“That must be the way he got those rabbits for thy mother.”
“I should know he had been a poacher,” asserted Janice, as she contemptuously held up and surveyed at arms-length the completed shirt. Then she laid it aside with another, and sighed a weary, “Heigh-ho, those are done. Here I have to work my fingers to the bone making shirts for him, just because mommy says he has n’t enough clothes,”—a sentence which perhaps partly accounted for the maiden’s somewhat jaundiced view of Charles.
“Are those for him?” cried Tabitha. “Why didst thou not tell me? I would have helped thee with them.”
“You ’d have been welcome to the whole job. As it is, I’ve done them so carelessly that I know mommy will scold me. But I wasn’t going to work myself to death for him!”
“I should have loved—I like shirt-making,” fibbed Tabitha.