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there was no malice between them afterwards.I should often, he repeated, see John and Francis fighting and then friends.
    It was a true word. Whenever John and Francis met, they quarrelled and made friends again, and I saw it often, for from that time onwards, the Clarksons and the Thorpes and the Ferrands were very close in intimacy.
    There was much visiting between Fairgap and The Breck. Many a Sunday we Clarksons dined there, roaming through the fields of Little Holroyd in the afternoon, or gathering bluebells in the woods, or climbing higher, when the heather was out, to the purple moors. Mr. Thorpe often dined at our house on Thursday, when he came into Bradford for Market Day, and John’s way from school seemed often to lie past our door. When he left school, as he did in a few months’ time, his visits were scarcely rarer; almost every day he brought some message about cloth from his father to mine, or about meeting, from Eliza to Will, or came in on his own account to see how things went with us. It came to be taken for granted that when a hinge, or the leg of a chair, or a loom treadle, or Sarah’s churn, needed repair, it was shown to John, who forthwith mended it, while I held the candle.
    Francis also came much to our house, because he began to read Latin with Will. It seemed he was much behind in his studies, from carelessness and truantry, and Mr. Ferrand, who thought of sending him to Oxford university with the sons of his friends the Tempests of Boiling Hall, had been told by the schoolmaster, Mr. Wilcocke, that if Francis did not mend his ways he would disgrace himself as a scholar. So twice a week Francis, Thunder lolloping behind him, came to Will with his Tully. Such a volume you never saw; dirty and dog’s-eared, with great scrawled jokes in the margin, some of which Francis would not let me see. I was so young and so unworldly then that I did not understand what this meant, but took it for simple unkindness on his part and was hurt by it, whereat he seemed very sorry. The exercises that he wrote for Will, too, were so blotted and untidy as to be almost illegible, and declensionsand conjugations seemed to pass in at one of Francis’s handsome ears only to pass out at the other. Indeed he nearly drove poor Will distracted, so that one afternoon, in a fit of warm temper such as sometimes took him, he rushed up to Holroyd Hall and threw the money for his tutoring on the table in front of Mr. Ferrand, crying that he could not in conscience take it, for he had not earned it. Mr. Ferrand was quite taken aback, and he must for once have berated his son severely, for Francis came down to Fairgap that night with a very hangdog look, and made many expressions of contrition and better behaviour for the future. For a week or two he was a model pupil, but soon slipped back into his old careless ways again, so that Will’s worried look grew deeper.
    But for all that we all loved Francis. Even our long-faced Sarah, who was very prim and godly and had been betrothed for years to a strict Puritan who had twice been fined for absenting himself from church on grounds of conscience, though she professed to regard Francis as an offspring of the evil one, did not scold when he pulled her apron-strings undone or called her Maypole in jest, and only pretended to box his ears when he stole up on her and kissed her. When Francis came she baked fresh oatcake, and gave the chairs a polish beyond ordinary; she would not wear the bright ribbons he brought her, but she kept them folded away in a wooden box which my mother had given her before she died. Tabby too became quite enamoured of Thunder, and the two played together often, Thunder rolling the cat over with his great jowl, and Tabby dabbing at his nose with her soft paws. I did not much like to see them, nor did David, for their play looked to us too much like cruelty, but when I wished to interfere Francis held me back, laughing heartily, and with