“Still, I shouldn’t like it,” replied Red, with a touch of obstinacy.

Eliza, however, was of a very different mind about this same young man.  She had not taken her new situation with any desire to see more of him; rather she hoped that by seeing him oftener she should more quickly put an end to his addresses.

The “Grand Hotel” of Chellaston was, as Miss Rexford had said, a boarding-house.  It had few transient visitors.  The only manufacturer of the village, and his wife, lived in it all the year round; so did one of the shopkeepers.  Several other quiet people lived there all winter; in summer the prices were raised, and it was filled to overflowing by more fashionable visitors from the two cities that were within a short journey.  This “hotel” was an enormous wooden house, built in the simplest fashion, a wide corridor running from front to rear on each storey, on which the room doors opened.  Rooms and corridors were large, lofty, and well-lighted by large windows.  The dining-room, billiard-room, office, and bar-room, on the ground-floor, together with the stairs and corridors, were uncarpeted, painted all over a light slate grey.  With the exception of healthy geraniums in most of the windows, there was little ornament in these ground-floor rooms; but all was new, clean, and airy.  The upper rooms were more heavily furnished, but were most of them shut up in winter.  All the year round the landlord took in the daily papers; and for that reason his bar-room, large and always tolerably quiet, was the best public reading-room the village boasted.

The keeper of this establishment was a rather elderly man, and of late he had been so crippled by rheumatism that he could walk little and only on crutches.  He was not a dainty man; his coat was generally dusty, his grey beard had always a grimy appearance of tobacco about it.  He spent the greater part of his day now sitting in a high pivot chair, his crutches leaning against it.

“You see, miss,” he said to Eliza, “I’ll tell you what the crying need for you is in this house at present; it’s to step round spry and see that the girls do their work.  It’s this way; when I was spry, if I wasn’t in the room, the young people knew that, like as not, I was just round the corner; they knew I might be there any minute; at present they know they’ll hear my sticks before I see them.  It makes all the difference.  What I want of you is to be feet for me, and eyes for me, and specially in the dining-room.  Mrs. Bantry—­that dressy lady you saw in the corridor—­Mrs. Bantry told me that this morning they brought her buckwheat cakes, and ten minutes after, the syrup to eat ’em with.  How hot do you suppose they were?”

He finished his speech with the fine sarcasm of this question.  He looked at Eliza keenly.  “You’re young,” he remarked warningly, “but I believe you’re powerful.”