Chippinge Borough by Stanley J. Weyman — Read

Sir Robert and his companion might have knocked longer and more loudly, and still to no purpose. For the schoolmistress, prepared to witness a certain amount of disorder on the Saturday, had been taken aback by the sight which met her eyes when she rose on Sunday morning. And long before noon she had sent her servants to their friends, locked up her house, and gone next door, to dispel by her cheerful face and her comfortable common sense the fears which she knew would prevail there. The sick lady was not in a state to withstand alarm; Mary was a young girl and timid; and neither the landlady nor Lady Sybil's maid were persons of strong mind. Miss Sibson felt that here was an excellent occasion for the display of that sturdy indifference with which firm nerves and a long experience of Bristol elections had endowed her.

"La, my dear," was her first remark, "it's all noise and nonsense! They look fierce, but there's not a man of them all, that if I took him soundly by the ear and said, ‘John Thomas Gaisford, I know you well and your wife! You live in the Pithay, and if you don't go straight home this minute I'll tell her of your goings on! '-there's not one of them, my dear," with a jolly laugh, "wouldn't sneak off with his tail between his legs! Hurt us, my lady? I'd like to see them doing it. Still, it will be no harm if we lock the door downstairs, and answer no knocks. We shall be cosy upstairs, and see all that's to be seen besides!"