The young man was shy and timid.
“You know, Rose, I treated her terrible bad at Ashburton, when I knocked away the workbox from under her arm.”
“She will like you all the better for it,” answered the girl. “Young maidens like a lad of spirit, and you may be sure it gave her pleasure to see you and Jan punching each other’s heads. That schoolmaster! he ain’t up to nothing but whacking childer with a cane. If you like, I’ll try and egg him on to fight you, and then you can knock him all to pieces; and there’s nothing surer for finding your way to Kitty’s heart. If she’s like me, she’ll like to see lads fighting about her.”
“You don’t think, Rose, she really had anything to do wi’ the fire?”
“The fire?” snapped the girl. “No more than you or I. Her uncle did it. He wanted the insurance money. That’s a fine tale’that she set fire to the warehouse, because her uncle wouldn’t hear of her marrying the schoolmaster’and now, of her own accord, she throws the fellow over. If she had been so set on him, she wouldn’t have done that. Can’t you see, Noah, or are you stupid, that her giving up Mr. Bramber is the best answer to that story? It shows it could not have been. And then, as to that other tale,’that Mr. Pepperill sent her back to set the place in a blaze,’no one who knows Kitty can believe that. She’s not the girl to do a wrong thing at anyone’s bidding. Besides, what good would it have been to her?”
Noah did not answer.
“You can’t do better than go right up to her and ask her to be yours’now. Everything is in your favour. Folk talk a pass’l of nonsense and spiteful lies about her. It makes her cruel unhappy. She’s been doing little else but cry for some days. You show her you don’t mind one snap what folks say, and you don’t believe a word o’ the lies against her, and I tell you she’d jump into your arms. It’s my belief that the schoolmaster turned nasty’that he began to show her he thought there might be something in it, that he knew people said they’d take away their subscription if he married her, and he made it so unpleasant for Kitty that she gave him up. And now you march in and conquer.”
“I’ll do so,” said Noah.
“And,” pursued Rose, “you must begin by making Kitty cry; that’s the preparing of the ground.”
“How am I to do that?”