“I know. I suppose she was glad of any excuse to get out of the office. She was even keen on coming to this place; I always thought that funny, it seems a very quiet spot for her to like.”

“I heard from that Miss Haines on the train that she was going to teach our landlord’s child, but when I asked her she seemed in a state about the idea. She seems to think she’s being forced into it on an imaginary promise. What’s the truth of the story?”

Maggie’s face was worried.

“I don’t know, and that’s a fact. I don’t like running down one of you girls to the other, but Sheila doesn’t always speak the truth. It’s not that she means to lie, I think, but she was always a fanciful little thing; you remember how when she was three she believed she was royalty, and we had to curtsy, well, she’s like that still; she imagines a lot and doesn’t always know what she’s imagined and what’s true.”

“You think she may have promised?”

Maggie’s forehead screwed into worried lines.

“Mr. Sheldon seems to me a nice man. Of course you never can tell with any man, but he doesn’t seem the sort to get a girl to the house because of her pretty face. He’s a busy farmer, and full of sense, and I should have thought if he said he wanted a governess, a governess is what he means.”

“All the same, you’re not sure.”

Maggie’s face cleared and her eyes twinkled.

“This is like old times. You were always so sharp it was a wonder you didn’t cut yourself. Never could keep anything from you, could I? Well, then, I’m not sure. I met him in the village the other day and he stopped and said in a nice way, but abruptly, ‘When is that daughter of yours coming to teach my Iris?’ I was quite flustered by his tone and said she wasn’t very strong, or something like that. Then he looked at me as if he were going to pat my arm and say something kind, but what he did say, though in quite a different voice, was: ‘I don’t want you to be bothered, but a bargain’s a bargain, you know.’”

“A bargain! In a dictionary that means ‘an agreement on terms of give and take’.”

“I dare say, dear, but country people use words in funny ways, and I think he just meant that she’d promised.”

“Well, if she did, she’s a little fool; she couldn’t teach in a million years, and she knows it.”