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Cranley's proposal suited the girls, for £2, 10s. was a sum that seemed quite feasible to collect among themselves. They determined, however, to get as much fun out of the business as possible. "Don't let's have a horrid subscription list!" urged Lilias. "It's so unutterably dull just to put down your name for half a crown. I hoped we were going to give a concert."
"It's a clear case," they said. "Leave him alone." Barton slackened his grip of Cranley's hands, and for some seconds they lay as if paralyzed on the table before him, white and cold, with livid circles round the wrists. The man's face was deadly pale, and wet with perspiration.
Such were the Miss Cranley's, the name of the elder of whom was Amelia, and that of the younger Sophia. Miss Amelia was nominally forty, and her sister thirty years of age. Perhaps if we stated the matter more accurately, we should rate the elder at fifty-six, and the younger somewhere about fifty. They both of them were masculine in their behaviour, and studious in their disposition.
Cranley's original idea had been the obvious one of transporting the girl to the Continent, where, under the pretence that a suitable situation of some kind had been found for her, he would so arrange that England should never see her more, and that her place among honest women should be lost forever. But there were difficulties in the way of this tempting plan.
Yow see, last night we were out arter conies, and thow I can swar we were out in th' open and not lookin' for conies on annybody's land, cos Dick an' I have already bin fined ten bob for snarin' conies on Farmer Cranley's land, an' if we went to Queensmead he moight think we'd been a snarin' there again. So Dick says to me, says he, 'Why not see the chap wot came into th' Anchor bar last night?
This his lordship found an opportunity of attaching to the skirt of Miss Cranley's sack. At the moment we have described, when she was again going to enter into the stream of her rhetoric, which, great as it naturally was, was now somewhat improved with copious draughts of claret, the cracker was set on fire. Poor Sophia now started in great agitation. "Bounce, bounce," went the cracker.
John Deloraine and he understood each other! Maitland, for perhaps the first time in his life, was happy in a thoroughly human old-fashioned way. Meanwhile the preparations for Cranley's trial dragged on. Interest, as usual, was frittered away in examinations before the magistrates.
Glenthorpe had gone to the bank at Heathfield that day to draw out a large sum of money to buy Mr. Cranley's field. "I think I had a confused idea that I would go and confide in Mr. Glenthorpe, and ask him to help Mr. Penreath.
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