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‘Very well, dear.’

They entered the parlour together, and Henry Mynors jumped up from his chair, and would not sit at table until they were seated. Then Mr. Tellwright carved the beef, giving each of them a very small piece, and taking only cheese for himself. Agnes handed the water-jug and the bread. Mynors talked about nothing in especial, but he talked and laughed the whole time; he even made the old man laugh, by a comical phrase aimed at Agnes’s mad passion for gilly-flowers. He seemed not to have detected any shortcomings in the table appointments—the coarse cloth and plates, the chipped tumblers, the pewter cruet, and the stumpy knives—which caused anguish in the heart of the housewife. He might have sat at such a table every night of his life.

‘May I trouble you for a little more beef?’ he asked presently, and Anna fancied a shade of mischief in his tone as he thus forced the old man into a tardy hospitality. ‘Thanks. And a morsel of fat.’

She wondered whether he guessed that she was worth fifty thousand pounds, and her father worth perhaps more.