“I can only say, Miss Marlow,” responded Sylvester to this confidence,” that if the first vehicle to reach us from the west is not my chaise two Hounslow-bred postilions will shortly be seeking situations in some other household than mine!”

In fact, his chaise arrived two days later, within a very short time of the snow’s ceasing to fall. Since it had taken the postilions more than two hours to accomplish the stage between Marlborough and Hungerford, Swale’s graphic description of the perils overcome in the cause of duty were not needed to convince Phoebe that the condition of the roads was still too bad to make her father’s appearance on the scene anything but a remote contingency.

Sylvester sent his chaise on to the Halfway House, a couple of miles up the road, but kept Swale at the Blue Boar. Swale, discovering that he must share a bedchamber with Keighley, and eat all his meals in the kitchen, was so much affronted that he hovered for as much as thirty seconds on the brink of tendering his resignation to his noble employer. He bowed stiffly when commanded to wait upon Mr. Orde, and sought solace for his lacerated sensibilities in treating that hapless young gentleman with such meticulous politeness that Tom was very soon begging Sylvester to leave him to the less expert but less intimidating ministrations of Will Scaling. Tom’s shyness of Sylvester had not survived forty-eight hours of depending upon him for his every need; and within an hour of having lodged this laughing complaint with him he was taking him roundly to task for having acted upon it in an ill-judged manner. “The lord knows what you said to the poor fellow, but if I’d guessed you would say anything at all I never would have told you about it!” he said. “It was worse than anything! He has been in here, begging my pardon, and telling me a bamboozling tale of having been feeling out of sorts, and hoping I shan’t have cause to complain to you again! Lord! I promise you I was never more mortified in my life! A pretty sneaksby you made me, Salford! Did you threaten to turn him off, just because he don’t care to wait on me?”

“I’m not so high-handed, Thomas. I only asked him to tell me if he was quite happy in my service.”

“Oh, was that all?” exclaimed Tom. “No wonder he was looking so tyburn-faced! And you say you’re not highhanded! Well, I think you’re mediaeval!”

That made Sylvester laugh. “But in what way am I mediaeval? I pay him a handsome wage, you know.”

“But you didn’t hire him to take care of me!”

“My dear Thomas, what in the world has he to do besides?” Sylvester interrupted, a little impatiently. “All the work he has to do for me in this hedge-tavern could not occupy him for as much as a couple of hours out of the twenty-four!”

“No, but he is your valet, not mine! You might as well have ordered him to groom your horses, or sweep the floor. And beyond all else you told him he must share Keighley’s room! Now, Salford, you must know that your valet is much above your groom’s touch!”

“Not in my esteem.”

“Very likely not, but—”

“But nothing, Thomas! In my own household my esteem is all that signifies. Does that seem mediaeval to you? If it seems so to Swale he may leave me: he’s not my slave!” He smiled suddenly. “Keighley is more my slave, I assure you—and I never engaged him, and could never dismiss him. Now, what is there in that to make you frown at me?”

“I wasn’t—I mean, I can’t explain it, only my father always says one should take care not to offend the sensibilities of inferior persons, and though I daresay you didn’t intend to do so, it does seem to me as if—But I should not say so!” Tom ended, rather hurriedly.

“Well, you have said so, haven’t you?” said Sylvester, quite gently, but with the smile hardening on his lips.

“I beg your pardon, sir!”

Sylvester made no reply to this, but remarked in a thoughtful tone: “To have become acquainted with you and with Miss Marlow ought to do me a great deal of good, I hope. What a number of faults I have of which I was never previously made aware!”

“I don’t know what more I can do than beg your pardon,” Tom said stiffly.

“Why, nothing! Unless you like to instruct me how I should treat my servants?” He paused, as Tom looked at him with belligerence in his eyes, and his lips very resolutely closed, and said quickly: “Oh, no! What an unhandsome thing to say to you! Forgive me: I didn’t mean it!”

There could be no resisting that coaxing note, or the softened expression, half contrite, half quizzical, that put to rout the satyr-look. Tom had been conscious of a thin film of ice behind which Sylvester had seemed to withdraw; he had resented it; but it had melted, and he found himself no longer angry, but stammering: “Oh, stuff! Besides, I had no business to be criticizing you! Particularly,” he added rather naively, “when you have been so devilish kind to me!”

“Humdudgeon!”

“No, it ain’t. What’s more—”

“If you mean to be a dead bore, Thomas, I’m off!” Sylvester interrupted. “And let me tell you that if you are trying to turn me up sweet you will be speedily bowled out! Kind was not the epithet you chose to describe my charitable attempt to make your bed more comfortable this morning!”

“Oh, well, I see I can’t please you!” Tom said, grinning. “First, I’m ungrateful, and now I’m a dead bore! But I’m not ungrateful, you know. I thought the trap was down when you arrived here, and so it was, for I’m in no case to help Phoebe. But you mean to do so, don’t you?”

“Do I? Oh, convey her to London! Yes, I’ll do that,” Sylvester replied. “If she still wishes it—though what she now hopes to achieve by it I don’t immediately perceive.”

Tom was unable to enlighten him, but Phoebe told him frankly that she hoped never to return to Austerby. This was sufficiently startling to make him put up his brows. She said, her eyes searching his face: “My grandmother told me once that she wished she might have me to live with her—had always wished it! Only when my mother died it was not possible, from some cause or another, for her to make that offer to Papa. And then, you know, he married Mama, which made it, she thought, unnecessary, as well as grossly uncivil, to remove me from Austerby.”

A slightly sardonic gleam of amusement flickered in his eyes. “But she did not, last year, invite you to remain with her?” he suggested.

A look of anxiety came into her face; her eyes, still fixed on his, seemed to question him. She said: “No. But she thought—Sir Henry Halford warning her against any unusual exertion—well, she thought it not right to ask Papa to leave me in her charge, since she is unequal to the task of taking me to balls, and—But I think—I am sure—she didn’t perfectly enter into my sentiments upon that head! I don’t care for balls, or fashionable life. At least, it was very agreeable when I went out with my aunt Ingham, for she is excessively good-natured, and doesn’t scold, or watch one all the time, or—But indeed I don’t hanker after gaiety, and although, at that time, it didn’t occur to me to ask her if I might live with her, when—” She paused, feeling the ice thin under her feet, and coloured.

“When you feared to be forced into a distasteful marriage?” he supplied helpfully.

Her colour deepened, but his words brought her engaging twinkle into her eyes. “Well, yes!” she acknowledged. “When that happened, I thought suddenly that if Grandmama would let me reside with her I need not be a trouble, but, on the contrary, useful, perhaps. And, in any event, it won’t be so very long now before I come of age, and then I hope—I believe—the case will be quite altered, and I need be a charge on no one.”

He instantly suspected her of having formed an attachment for some hopeless ineligible, and asked her bluntly if she had matrimony in view.

“Matrimony! Oh, no!” she responded. “I daresay I shall never be married. I have another scheme—quite different!” She added, in some confusion: “Excuse me on that head, if you please! I had not meant to speak of it, and must not! Pray do not regard it! Only tell me if you think—for perhaps you are better acquainted with her than I—that my grandmother will like to have me to live with her?”

He believed that there was nothing Lady Ingham would like less; but he believed also, and maliciously, that she would find it impossible to repulse her granddaughter; and he replied, smiling: “Why not?”

She looked relieved, but said very earnestly: “Every day I spend away from Austerby strengthens my resolve never to go back there! I was never so happy in my life before! You can’t understand how that should be so, I daresay, but I have felt, these last few days, as though I had escaped from a cage!” Her solemnity vanished. “Oh! what a trite simile! Never mind!”

“Very well,” he said. “Keighley shall escort you to London as soon as the roads are passable.”

She thanked him, but said doubtfully: “And Tom?”

“I shall send a message to his parents, when you are gone. Don’t you trust me? I shan’t leave him until I have handed him over to his father.”

“Yes, indeed I trust you. I was wondering only whether I ought to accept so much help from you—using your chaise—depriving you of your groom!” She added naively: “When I was not, at first, very civil to you!”

“But you are never civil to me!” he complained. “You began by giving me a heavy set-down, and you followed that with a handsome trimming! And now you threaten to deny me a chance to retrieve my character!” He laughed, seeing her at a loss for words, and took her hand, and lightly kissed it. “Cry friends, Sparrow! Am I so very bad?”