‘Not yet, maister,’ said the excellent David.
‘We’ll wait till she’s down,’ said Loveday. ‘When she is, let us know.’
David went indoors again, and Loveday and Bob continued their morning survey by ascending into the mysterious quivering recesses of the mill, and holding a discussion over a second pair of burr-stones, which had to be re-dressed before they could be used again. This and similar things occupied nearly twenty minutes, and, looking from the window, the elder of the two was reminded of the time of day by seeing Mrs. Garland’s table-cloth fluttering from her back door over the heads of a flock of pigeons that had alighted for the crumbs.
‘I suppose David can’t find us,’ he said, with a sense of hunger that was not altogether strange to Bob. He put out his head and shouted.
‘The lady is not down yet,’ said his man in reply.
‘No hurry, no hurry,’ said the miller, with cheerful emptiness. ‘Bob, to pass the time we’ll look into the garden.’
‘She’ll get up sooner than this, you know, when she’s signed articles and got a berth here,’ Bob observed apologetically.
‘Yes, yes,’ said Loveday; and they descended into the garden.
Here they turned over sundry flat stones and killed the slugs sheltered beneath them from the coming heat of the day, talking of slugs in all their branches—of the brown and the black, of the tough and the tender, of the reason why there were so many in the garden that year, of the coming time when the grass-walks harbouring them were to be taken up and gravel laid, and of the relatively exterminatory merits of a pair of scissors and the heel of the shoe. At last the miller said, ‘Well, really, Bob, I’m hungry; we must begin without her.’
They were about to go in, when David appeared with haste in his motions, his eyes wider vertically than crosswise, and his cheeks nearly all gone.