“Well, Miss, it’s this. Do you
owe anybody a grudge?”
“No, not any one,” said Maggie, looking
up at him inquiringly. “Why?”
“Oh, lors, Miss,” said Bob, pinching Mumps’s
neck harder than ever. “I wish you did,
an’ tell me; I’d leather him till I couldn’t
see—I would—an’ the Justice
might do what he liked to me arter.”
“Oh, Bob,” said Maggie, smiling faintly,
“you’re a very good friend to me.
But I shouldn’t like to punish any one, even
if they’d done me wrong; I’ve done wrong
myself too often.”
This view of things was puzzling to Bob, and threw
more obscurity than ever over what could possibly
have happened between Stephen and Maggie. But
further questions would have been too intrusive, even
if he could have framed them suitably, and he was
obliged to carry baby away again to an expectant mother.
“Happen you’d like Mumps for company,
Miss,” he said when he had taken the baby again.
“He’s rare company, Mumps is; he knows
iverything, an’ makes no bother about it.
If I tell him, he’ll lie before you an’
watch you, as still,—just as he watches
my pack. You’d better let me leave him
a bit; he’ll get fond on you. Lors, it’s
a fine thing to hev a dumb brute fond on you; it’ll
stick to you, an’ make no jaw.”
“Yes, do leave him, please,” said Maggie.
“I think I should like to have Mumps for a friend.”
“Mumps, lie down there,” said Bob, pointing
to a place in front of Maggie, “and niver do
you stir till you’re spoke to.”
Mumps lay down at once, and made no sign of restlessness
when his master left the room.
St. Ogg’s Passes Judgment
It was soon known throughout St. Ogg’s that
Miss Tulliver was come back; she had not, then, eloped
in order to be married to Mr. Stephen Guest,—at
all events, Mr. Stephen Guest had not married her;
which came to the same thing, so far as her culpability
was concerned. We judge others according to results;
how else?—not knowing the process by which
results are arrived at. If Miss Tulliver, after
a few months of well-chosen travel, had returned as
Mrs. Stephen Guest, with a post-marital trousseau,
and all the advantages possessed even by the most
unwelcome wife of an only son, public opinion, which
at St. Ogg’s, as else where, always knew what
to think, would have judged in strict consistency
with those results. Public opinion, in these cases,
is always of the feminine gender,—not the
world, but the world’s wife; and she would have
seen that two handsome young people—the
gentleman of quite the first family in St. Ogg’s—having
found themselves in a false position, had been led
into a course which, to say the least of it, was highly
injudicious, and productive of sad pain and disappointment,
especially to that sweet young thing, Miss Deane.
Mr. Stephen Guest had certainly not behaved well; but
then, young men were liable to those sudden infatuated
