“Oi,” was the reply, which came from suspiciously near the keyhole.
“What do you want?” she asked impatiently, opening the door on Howlie Seaborne.
“Yew’re to come down,” he announced baldly.
“I am not ready,” said she, with a haughty look. “Who sent you up here, I should like to know?”
“Parson says yew be to come down,” he repeated.
“Howell!” she exclaimed sharply, using the name by which he was known to his superiors, “how often have I told you that that is not the way to speak of Mr. Lewis; I never heard of such impertinence!”
“An’ if a bain’t a parson, wot be he? Ye moight call ’im even worse nor that too, oi suppose,” replied Howlie with a snort.
Mr. Lewis’s requirements were modest, so he kept only one indoor servant, who cooked for him and waited on his simple necessities, but since his niece had arrived at the Vicarage and there was consequently more work, Howlie had been brought in to help domestic matters forward. He carried coals, pumped water, cleaned knives, and, had it been possible to teach him the rudiments of good manners, would have been a really valuable member of the household.
But those who associated with him had either to take him as they found him or to leave him altogether. Isoline would have preferred to do the latter, for there was in her an antagonism to the boy which had begun the moment she climbed into her uncle’s crazy vehicle on the Brecon road. She detested boys of every sort, and this one was decidedly the most horrible specimen of that generation of vipers she had ever come across.