“There’s no trouble afoot that I can mend?” asked he, in a minute or two.
“Oh, no! It’s really nothing—nothing at all,” said she. “It’s only that Mr. Corbet went away without saying good-bye to me, that’s all.” And she looked as if she should have liked to cry again.
“That was not manners,” said Dixon, decisively.
“But it was my fault,” replied Ellinor, pleading against the condemnation.
Dixon looked at her pretty sharply from under his ragged bushy eyebrows.
“He had been giving me a lecture, and saying I didn’t do what his sisters did—just as if I were to be always trying to be like somebody else—and I was cross and ran away.”
“Then it was Missy who wouldn’t say good-by. That was not manners in Missy.”
“But, Dixon, I don’t like being lectured!”
“I reckon you don’t get much of it. But, indeed, my pretty, I daresay Mr. Corbet was in the right; for, you see, master is busy, and Miss Monro is so dreadful learned, and your poor mother is dead and gone, and you have no one to teach you how young ladies go on; and by all accounts Mr. Corbet comes of a good family. I’ve heard say his father had the best stud-farm in all Shropshire, and spared no money upon it; and the young ladies his sisters will
