nice young chap, to his now constant anxious preoccupation. "You come along to-morrow," he said, "and I’ll see you gets your walk with Daisy. It’s only right you and she should have a chance of seeing one another without old folk being by; else how’s the girl to tell whether she likes you or not! For the matter of that, you hardly knows her, Joe" He looked at the young man consideringly.
Chandler shook his head impatiently. "I knows her quite as well as I wants to know her," he said. "I made up my mind the very first time I see’d her, Mr. Bunting."
"No! Did you really?" said Bunting. "Well, come to think of it, I did so with her mother; aye, and years after, with Ellen, too. But I hope you’ll never want no second, Chandler."
"God forbid!" said the young man under his breath. And then he asked, rather longingly, "D’you think they’ll be out long now, Mr. Bunting?"
And Bunting woke up to a due sense of hospitality. "Sit down, sit down; do!" he said hastily. "I don’t believe they’ll be very long. They’ve only got a little bit of shopping to do."
And then, in a changed, in a ringing, nervous tone, he asked, "And how about your job, Joe? Nothing new, I take it? I suppose you’re all just waiting for the next time?"
"Aye—that’s about the figure of it." Chandler’s voice had also changed; it was now sombre, menacing. "We’re fair tired of it—beginning to wonder when it’ll end, that we are!"
"Do you ever try and make to yourself a picture of
