CHAPTER VIII
MISS APHRA'S CURATE
We had scarcely started our tea, and hunger was still keen upon Elsie, when there came a noise of calling, quite different from the howling of mad folk, or the mocking laughter or ugly whine of Jeremy. Miss Orrin poured out tea with a kind of grim aplomb. If I had been afraid that she meant to poison us—or at least Elsie, I was soon undeceived. The amount of tea that she poured down her own throat was astonishing in the extreme. There were, however, certainly several sorts of cake that she would not allow her master, Mr. Stennis, to touch, on pretext of indigestion, but which she pressed upon us. And it was all that I could do, by kicking her shins beneath the table, to keep Elsie from accepting.
I managed it all right, though. They might have been as harmless as my father's acid drops. But after all there was only one Elsie, and I was not going to run any risks.
There was a distant sound of calling across the moat, and at the noise, Mr. Stennis frowned, an ugly look coming over his face, while on the contrary the sound had a still more extraordinary effect upon Miss Orrin. Her eyes gleamed more softly, losing for a moment their iron-gray expression. Her hands went up instinctively to the thin little corkscrew curls which bobbed at either side of her face.
In ten seconds the fierce, angular old maid looked ten years younger. Love, vanity, self-consciousness—ye are wondrous things.
"If it's that interfering curate from Over Breckonton, I'll throw him into the moat! I'll have the dogs on him," growled Mr. Stennis, "always poking his nose in when he is least wanted!"
Then he turned to his housekeeper, and detecting her busy fingers, he said with a sneer—
"What, prinking again! I see. Only the beneficed clergy have any chance with you, Miss Aphra!"