"You shall not come near my happy valley,"—it would never have done for me to encourage this,—"remember what you said of the hero who lives there. You took him for a forger, or a ticket-of-leave man."
"Well, I don't care a fig what he is, so long as he gives you satisfaction. But about Grace—I tell you I won't wait. If she kissed her hand to me, is not that enough to show—I shall be there to-morrow; but you must not let her know."
"Not to-morrow, Jackson. Why, it is her butter-day. And if she could ever cut up rough, I believe it would be the butter, at this time of year."
"Not a bit of it. Nothing would ever make her peppery. And she is sure to be at home, and up in your part of the premises. That is where she looks the most enthralling. But don't let her know, for the world, that I am coming."
It was fair that he should have his own way at last, after giving Grace a luxury of time to think about him, since his offer was made about ten days ago, when she put all the blame of her shilly-shally upon me! See how differently I did everything.
The following morning I gave her a hint—for my duty was to her first, and long afterwards to Jackson—that peradventure somebody in the course of the morning might turn up, to have a look at me in the harness-room; but she took the greatest pains not to understand me, and even put a particularly simple jacket on, of buff-coloured linen smocked with blue, and a delicate suggestion of retiring fronds—almost like a landscape of forget-me-not and lady-fern. But the shade of it was nothing in comparison with the shape, inasmuch as the latter was our Gracie's own; and everybody knows what that means. Only she herself had not the least idea about any part of it. All she cared for was to get on with her work; so she kept all her body and arms in motion, as if she were intent upon throwing shadows.
When the butter was coming forth, crowned with glory,—which the cleverest dairymaid may doubt about, as she has to do sometimes with a little pat or two inside her,—and the long slab of enamelled stuff (for we could not afford white marble) was tilted so that every golden patin could crisp itself without encroachment, and Grace, like a miser telling his moidores, was entering the upshot upon a white slate hanging by a scarlet ribbon, and pondering in her heart with the scales behind her, whether she had tried to cheat any one more than the good of the family demanded, suddenly a riding-glove was waved inside the door, and its fingers went about like bananas on a string, because there was no flesh inside them.
"Can't have you now, Joe," Miss Grace cried, with a presence of mind that could only be surpassed by the colour presented on her cheeks; "come again in half an hour. I am calculating now." As if old Joe Croaker had ever even seen a glove!
"I won't say a word, if I may come in. Oh, do let me come in and be calculated too. If I may only sit upon a pan upside down, or anyhow, quite out of sight in the corner. Oh, what a sweet place! I could live upon the smell of it. But I won't even go near the lace-edging of a pat."