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Janice Meredith by Paul Leicester Ford
page 36 of 806 (04%)
Granting him to be but one and twenty years of age, as his
covenant stated, and as in fact he looked, his service must have
been shorter than the act of Parliament allowed, and this seeming
bar to their hypothesis caused many winks and shrugs over
the tankards of ale consumed of an evening at the King George
tavern in the village of Brunswick. Furthermore, for some
months the deserter columns of such stray numbers of the
"London Gazette" as occasionally drifted to the ordinary were
eagerly scanned by the loungers, on the possibility that they
might contain some advertisement of a fellow standing five feet
ten, with broad shoulders, light brown hair, straight nose, and
gray eyes, whose whereabout was of interest to His Majesty's
War Office, Whitehall. Neither from this source, however,
nor from any other, did they gain the slightest clue to the
past history of the bond-servant, spy upon the fellow who
would.

Nor was talk of the man limited to farm hands and tavern
idlers, for dearth of new topics in the little community made
him a subject of converse to the two girls during the hours of
spinet practice, embroidery, and sewing, which were their daily
occupations between breakfast and dinner, and, even extended
into the afternoon, if the stint was not completed. Yet all
their discussion brought them no nearer to agreement, Janice
maintaining that Fownes was a villain in posse, if not in esse,
while Tabitha contended that Charles had been disappointed
in a love which he still, none the less, cherished, and which to
her mind accounted in every particular for his conduct. As
such a theory allowed considerable scope to the imagination,
she promptly created several romances about him, in all of
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