“No.”
“He says that he has seen just such a crowd as this in a bank before. At Manchester seventeen years ago, when he was a boy. There was a run on the bank in which his father worked, and people fought for places as they are fighting to-day. He does not seem to think it—lucky.”
“What else does he think?” Arthur retorted with contempt. “What other rubbish? He’d better mind his own business and do his work. He ought to know more than to say such things to you or to anyone.”
Betty stared. “Dear me,” she replied, “we are high and mighty to-day! Hoity toity!” And turning her shoulder on him, she became absorbed in the scene before her.
But that evening she was more than usually grave, and when her father, pouring out his fourth and last glass of port—for he was an abstemious man—told her that the partnership articles had been signed that afternoon, she nodded. “Yes, I knew,” she said sagely.
“How, Betty? I didn’t tell you. I have told no one. Did Arthur?”
“No, father, not in so many words. But I guessed it.” And during the rest of the evening she was unusually pensive.
CHAPTER IX
Spring was late that year. It was the third week in April before the last streak of snow faded from the hills, or the showers of sleet ceased to starve the land. Morning after morning the Squire tapped his glass and looked abroad for fine weather. The barley-sowing might wait, but the oats would not wait, and at a time when there should have been abundant grass he was still carrying hay to the racks. The lambs were doing ill.
Morning after morning, with an old caped driving-coat cast about his shoulders and a shabby hunting-cap on his grey head, he would walk down to the little bridge that carried the drive over the stream. There, a gaunt high-shouldered figure, he would stand, looking morosely out over the wet fields. The distant hills were clothed in mist, the nearer heights wore light caps, down the vale the clear rain-soaked air showed sombre woods and red soil, with here and there a lop-sided elm, bursting into bud, and reddening to match the furrows. “We shall lose one in ten of the lambs,” he thought, “and not a sound foot in the flock!”