species of yell. Mademoiselle turns up her pretty nose, and readjusts her
chevron gloves.

'Have you not got any cuffs, Jack?' she asks, 'your wrists look so bare
without them.'

Jack makes no reply. Another silence. Presently he points with an
expression meant to be sardonic at a distant farmhouse with his whip.

'Jenny's married,' he says, full well aware that this announcement will
wake her up, for there had been of old a sort of semi-feud or rivalry
between the two girls, daughters of neighbouring farmers, and both with
pretensions to good looks.

'Who to?' she asks eagerly.

'To old Billy L----; lots of tin.'

'Pshaw!' replies mademoiselle. 'Why, he's sixty, a nasty, dirty old
wretch.'

'He has plenty of money,' suggests Jack.

'What you think plenty of money, perhaps. He is nothing but a farmer,' as
if a farmer was quite beneath her notice.

Just then a farmer rode out into the road from the gateway of a field, and
Jack pulled up the pony. The farmer was stout, elderly, and florid; he
appeared fairly well-to-do by his dress, but was none too particular to
use his razor regularly. Yet there was a tenderness--almost a pathos--in