The rattling did not abate, till she darted across the room to snatch the keys from him, the hauteur of her deportment flying to the winds.
“You stupid boy!” she exclaimed, “if you were at Waterchurch Court, where I have been, you would not be tolerated for a single day! Her ladyship would send you packing in a very short time!”
He fixed his gaze upon her critically, and observed that, in taking off her hat, she had loosened some hairpins.
“Yewre ’air’s coming down,” he remarked placidly.
Her hand went up to it at once.
“Oi can settle that for yew,” he continued, with pleasant good-nature, “for oi learned to plat up the ’orses’ tails proper when I was working i’ the yard at Jones’.”
“You are impertinent as well as noisy,” said Miss Ridgeway angrily; “if you cannot unlock my box you had better go down-stairs. Why Mr. Lewis keeps you here at all is a wonder to me, mannerless, good-for-nothing boy that you are!”
He gathered himself up from the floor on which he was kneeling by the box, and left the room. Isoline was still ruffled when she turned to her dressing-table, but Howlie was smiling as he made his way to the back premises. “Miss is crewell hoigh since she come back from Fenton’s,” he remarked to the maid-servant as he entered the kitchen. “She’s a settin’ her cap at the young general over there. Moy! but he’s a smart feller too,” he added, thinking of the half-crown.
For a couple of days after her return the memory of Waterchurch buoyed up Isoline through the flatness of life at the Vicarage, and she spent many an hour anticipating Harry’s coming and its almost certain result. But, in spite of this, time was long, and the excitement in her mind made her restless, too restless to sit quietly in the house; she felt she must be out and moving about—a rather unusual thing with her.
It was with a half-formed resolution that she put on her hat one afternoon, the Pedlar’s Stone in her mind. Harry was so much in her thoughts that she was a little unwilling to replace his visionary image by the reality of the person she was likely to find there, but, in spite of this, her feet seemed to carry her imperceptibly towards the way that had become so familiar. She found herself on the turf of the plateau almost before she had decided whether it would be pleasant to see Rhys or not.