Now do you know who I am ?" Lord bless us and save us! Here--four good hours before we expected him--was Mr.Franklin Blake! Before I could say a word, I saw Mr.Franklin, a little surprised to all appearance, look up from me to Rosanna.

Following his lead, I looked at the girl too.

She was blushing of a deeper red than ever, seemingly at having caught Mr.Franklin's eye; and she turned and left us suddenly, in a confusion quite unaccountable to my mind, without either making her curtsey to the gentleman or saying a word to me.

Very unlike her usual self: a civiller and better-behaved servant, in general, you never met with.
"That's an odd girl," says Mr.Franklin.

"I wonder what she sees in me to surprise her ?" "I suppose, sir," I answered, drolling on our young gentleman's Continental education, "it's the varnish from foreign parts." I set down here Mr.Franklin's careless question, and my foolish answer, as a consolation and encouragement to all stupid people--it being, as I have remarked, a great satisfaction to our inferior fellow-creatures to find that their betters are, on occasions, no brighter than they are.
Neither Mr.Franklin, with his wonderful foreign training, nor I, with my age, experience, and natural mother-wit, had the ghost of an idea of what Rosanna Spearman's unaccountable behaviour really meant.