"Frisky is not likely to do that, dad. He's got more sedate since those days. It was about the same time that Sylvia and I locked Mick in the hayloft."
"Five years ago, Pam? It can't be five years ago. I'd never have left that post unmended five years. Why, it was only the other day I was saying I'd have over the mason from Lettergort to mend it."
He had now done fumbling with the tie of the gate, and Pamela drove into the overgrown avenue. While he was replacing the bit of string he kept up a running fire of jests with the small, shame-faced children, to which she listened with a half-smile.
"Dear old dad," she said to herself. "He has been so long letting things go that he even forgets that he has let them go. And I'm his own daughter."
She took up a breadth of her pink frock and looked at it. There was a rent of at least three inches in it. Pamela shook her head in mute self-reproach.
"It'll never do for 'Trevithick's lad,' as the dear dad calls him. I don't suppose he's used to young women with rents in their frocks. And I am a young woman, and so is Sylvia, though our own father has never found it out."
As she sat waiting, a dreamy smile came to her lips and a softness to her eyes. It was like a prophecy of what "Trevithick's lad" was to bring—like the dawn of love, sweet and bitter, that was to bring Pam the hoyden into her woman's inheritance.
"Come along, dear," she said with a start, turning to her father: it seemed as if his head-pattings of the children would never come to an end. "Frisky's getting uneasy, and will bolt with me and the crockery, if you don't hurry up."
Her father jumped into the little cart with a laugh.
"I forgot that you were waiting, Pam, those infants have such pleasing ways. But as for Frisky running away with you, why, bless me! he's had time to get old since he ran away with the post; at least, so you say, though I should never have believed it—never!"