“Oh, we didn’t hear ’ee the first time!” cried Bowman.
“Now don’t for heaven’s sake spoil the young man’s temper by answering like that!” said the tranter.
“You won’t do that, my friends!” the vicar shouted.
“Well to be sure, what ears!” said Mr. Penny in a whisper. “Beats any horse or dog in the parish, and depend upon’t, that’s a sign he’s a proper clever chap.”
“We shall see that in time,” said the tranter.
Old William, in his gratitude for such thanks from a comparatively new inhabitant, was anxious to play all the tunes over again; but renounced his desire on being reminded by Reuben that it would be best to leave well alone.
“Now putting two and two together,” the tranter continued, as they went their way over the hill, and across to the last remaining houses; “that is, in the form of that young female vision we zeed just now, and this young tenor-voiced parson, my belief is she’ll wind en round her finger, and twist the pore young feller about like the figure of 8—that she will so, my sonnies.”
CHAPTER VI.
CHRISTMAS MORNING
The choir at last reached their beds, and slept like the rest of the parish. Dick’s slumbers, through the three or four hours remaining for rest, were disturbed and slight; an exhaustive variation upon the incidents that had passed that night in connection with the school-window going on in his brain every moment of the time.
In the morning, do what he would—go upstairs, downstairs, out of doors, speak of the wind and weather, or what not—he could not refrain from an unceasing renewal, in imagination, of that interesting enactment. Tilted on the edge of one foot he stood beside the fireplace, watching his mother grilling rashers; but there was nothing in grilling, he thought, unless the Vision grilled. The limp rasher hung down between the bars of the gridiron like a cat in a child’s arms; but there was nothing in similes, unless She uttered them. He looked at the daylight shadows of a yellow hue, dancing with the firelight shadows in blue on the whitewashed chimney corner, but there was nothing in shadows. “Perhaps the new young wom—sch—Miss Fancy Day will sing in church with us this morning,” he said.