It is to be feared that the sting of Mr. Will Flynt’s offence lay precisely in Jinny’s ignorance of horses, and that if her old companion had come to her aid more tactfully, she would have welcomed his co-operation in the great purchase. But her pride in her work would hardly allow her to admit even to herself that here was a commission perhaps beyond her capacities. Had she not enjoyed an almost lifelong experience of Methusalem? As a monogamist would resent being told he knew nothing of matrimony, so Jinny repudiated the notion that she knew nothing of equinity. Besides, the cattle-market was far from seeming so strange a world to her as Will had imagined. Had her cart not often conveyed thence or thither a netted calf, had she not marketed even his own mother’s piglings? A fig for the masculine aura! If Mr. Flippance exaggerated after his fashion in declaring she would have undertaken to get him the moon—at any rate it was not the man in it that would have kept her back.

It was, therefore, with a bruised and burning but indomitable heart that Jinny went about her work these ever longer days. For women must work, though men may mope. Poor Will, who had nothing to do but to chew his bitter cud of memory, was the more pitiable, and his temper was not improved when early Friday evening the comparatively clean Master Gale, evidently caught on his way home from school, arrived with “the same as uzual.” This apple-cheeked and white-collared understudy for Jinny was no less an eyesore than Uncle Lilliwhyte, and Will made Martha refuse the parcel on the ground that if they encouraged the lad, it would lead to truancy. Such was his solicitude for the schoolboy whose copy-book he had diverted from its scholastic function. But he was not less furious when Farmer Gale brought back the parcel the next morning on horseback and explained amiably that he had seen Jinny about it, and that henceforward this overburdened damsel would leave the Flynt parcel with his, and he would have pleasure in delivering it in the course of riding about his farms.

The rain and the cold snap, that had come so suddenly after the quarrel in the wood, was welcome to Jinny in her present mood. For her the summer was over. True, she espied its first wild rose, but it reminded her only of a round strawberry water-ice, such as her well-to-do clients spooned at the Chipstone confectioner’s. Everything was gelid, except Nip’s nose, and that but added to her depression. Was the darling feverish from the scratches of his spiny crawlings, or did he share his mistress’s heavy humours? Her distraction might have led to a nasty accident had not the last of the trio kept his head, for in a lonely lane Methusalem, who in these days seemed to whinny his sympathy and nuzzle into her palm with enhanced tenderness, deftly avoided the prostrate antlered trunk of an oak-tree which had been split and splintered by lightning. Possibly it had lain there since that Sunday’s storm, for her work had not brought her that way. The bark of the whole tree had been peeled off, save for a small patch where a few buds still suggested vitality, and Jinny had a grandiose sense that all nature sympathized with the strange desolation that had come over her joyous self.

Her mind turned to fate and constellations as she drew up at Miss Gentry’s door and summoned with a blast that fantastic female, who was feeding the chickens with which she variegated life and tantalized Squibs. Miss Gentry did not need anything beyond her usual depilatory. It was a standing grief and astonishment to her that though white lilies (under the domain of the moon) will “trimly deck a blank place with hair,” neither Culpeper nor the planets had provided against the contrary contingency: even fig-wort (owned by Venus) merely removing wens and freckles. Hence she was reduced to a mere chemist’s prescription: a solution of barium sulphide swayed by no known planet. The stuff came in a pot.

Miss Gentry in ordering it did not shirk the word “depilatory.” On the contrary she pronounced the five syllables with a pomposity which was the more impressive to Jinny because even “The Universal Spelling-Book” stopped short at four syllables. Not for worlds—whether to her client or the public at large—would Jinny have betrayed her knowledge that the hair-destroyer represented a never-ending battle with Miss Gentry’s moustache. And for the sensitive dressmaker herself the polysyllable was a soothing cover. Ostrich-like she hid her head in its spacious sandiness.

There was, however, the little matter of Martha’s bleached and new-trimmed bonnet, which Jinny might convey to Frog Farm, and the casual mention that it was Will who had brought it led to considerable conversation. Jinny’s equipage was drawn up outside the little garden, where tulips (red, damask, and pink) stood like tall guards before a tropical palace; and Miss Gentry, despite the chill wind, leaned on her garden-gate, carefully nursing her black cat against Nip’s possible swoops.

The excellent lady, whose erudition Jinny had always absorbed with the reverence due to a reader of The Englishwoman’s Magazine, was always delighted to have the girl sitting at her feet—even though to the crude physical vision Jinny always appeared to be sitting above her head, and Miss Gentry to be looking up to her. Sometimes real information from the aforesaid magazine, which bore the sub-title of “The Christian Mother’s Miscellany,” was thus transmitted to Jinny; but Miss Gentry’s brain was obviously too cluttered up with archaic notions to be really beneficial to her young devotee. Thus, although Miss Gentry enlarged Jinny’s mind, it was more a matter of range than of accuracy.

The conversation to-day, however, was on a more personal plane. Jinny was resolved to speak no further word to Mr. William Flynt: his interference was unforgivable. But when it transpired that he had brought the bonnet, she did not attempt to check Miss Gentry’s flow of favourable comment, still less to contradict it. For a Peculiar he was quite the gentleman, Miss Gentry opined, especially after that coarse and flippant Bundock. Not tall enough for her taste, because she thought you ought always to look up to a man; still, handsome in a rough way, despite his ginger hair.

“Not ginger!” Jinny protested.

“It shades to ginger,” the dressmaker replied severely, as an authority upon colours. “But it served to brighten up his face, which was none too cheerful. Born under Saturn, I should think, and the sign of the Scorpion.”

“And what effect has that?” asked Jinny, alarmed.

“Well, for one thing it qualifies the unruly actions and passions of Venus.”

“The goddess of Beauty,” observed Jinny, airing her Spelling-Book.

“Of Love,” corrected Miss Gentry.

Jinny’s face shaded towards the colour under discussion, and she cried: “Down, Nip,” to that recumbent animal’s amusement. “He nearly jumped on the bonnet-box,” she explained.

“He should eat herbs under the dominion of the Sun,” said Miss Gentry.

“Nip?”

“No—Mr. Flynt. He needs vital spirits.”

“Still, ginger is hardly the word,” murmured Jinny.

“It looks ginger against his clothes,” persisted Miss Gentry. “Of course a man can’t understand dressing himself.”

“Why, he’s better dressed than anybody in Long Bradmarsh—except Mr. Fallow,” said Jinny.

Miss Gentry was mollified by the compliment to her pastor. “All the same his coat wrinkles at the shoulders,” she said. “You notice next time.”

“I’ve got better things to do than to look at Mr. Flynt’s coat-sleeves,” said Jinny. “And I’ll be going on.”

“Well, if you do see him, give him my kind regards,” said Miss Gentry, “and say that any time he’s passing and would like a cup of tea, I’d be glad to discuss the tract I gave him.”

“Oh, it’s no use trying to convert him,” said Jinny. “He’s nothing at all.”

“Then why did he go to your chapel the other Sunday?”

“Did he go?” said Jinny, amazed. “I dare say that’s what has depressed him.”

“He not only went, but with your peculiar ideas of the House of God, he had his dinner there!”

“Oh, no! Why he was dining at ‘The Black Sheep.’”

“Nothing of the sort. A dressmaker has ears.”

“But a carrier has eyes. And I saw him there.”

“Then I’ll never believe Isabella Mawhood again.”

“I hope you haven’t been making her more vanities,” said Jinny, as she slowly turned Methusalem’s nose the other way.

“Only a new bonnet, you funny little Peculiar. You see the case was coming on at the Chelmsford Sessions, and I should have got a verdict against Mr. Mawhood not only for his wife’s silk dress, but for the chickens his ferrets killed——”

“You issued a replevin, I suppose,” put in Jinny grandly.

“I could have had a tort or a subpoena or anything,” assented Miss Gentry, with equal magnificence. “But the defendant thought best to compromise. He’s got to clear this cottage of rats for nothing this winter—you know how they come gnawing my best stuffs—and in return my landlady has to pay for a new bonnet for his wife.”

“But Mrs. Mawhood’s silk dress—who pays for that?” asked Jinny mystified.

“Oh, Mrs. Mott pays for that.”

“But why Mrs. Mott?”

“She didn’t want to have a scandal in the community, and your so-called Deacon swore he hadn’t got the money. They make Mrs. Mott pay for everything nowadays.”

“It’s too bad,” said Jinny. “And Mrs. Mawhood comes out of it all with her dress paid for and a new bonnet.”

“Well, she does become clothes more than her sister-Peculiars, I must say that—present company excepted! That old rat-catcher’s lucky to have got such a young wife for his second, even though he was her third.”

“She’s not so young,” said Jinny.

“She’s no older than I am,” persisted Miss Gentry. “And born, like me, under Venus.”

Jinny suppressed a smile. Despite her respect for Miss Gentry she had never accepted her standing invitation to explore the Colchester romance. Unread in the literature of love though she was, the girl’s natural instinct refused to see the middle-aged moustachio’d dressmaker as the heroine of a love-drama. Her affair with the angel seemed, indeed, to place her apart. “I think it’s disgraceful to have had three husbands,” she insisted.

“Not at all, when each is a Christian marriage, and the first two spouses have been duly taken by an overruling Providence. Of course the unhallowed romance one inspires is another thing. As I always say to Bundock—oh, we ought not to have mentioned names, ought we, Squibs dear? Please forget it.” She stroked the cat in her arms. “But there, Jinny! You can’t understand these things—you too were born under Saturn.”

“How do you know that?” Jinny was vaguely resentful.

“You’re so cold-blooded—perhaps it was even under the constellation of the Pisces—the Fishes, that is. You’ve never taken the faintest interest in Love. Do you know, I made a rhyme about you the other day.”

“A rhyme!” Jinny was excited. “Do tell me!”

Miss Gentry shook her head. “You wouldn’t like it.”

“Oh, but I must hear it.”

Miss Gentry continued obstinately to stroke Squibs. But finally, as if electrified by the fur, she broke out like an inspired pythoness, in a weird chanting voice:

“When the Brad in opposite ways shall course,

Lo! Jinny’s husband shall come on a horse,

And Jinny shall then learn Passion’s force.”