Charlotte took off her apron and started to answer it, but her mother caught her and pinned up a stray lock of hair.

"I 'most wish you had put on your other dress again," she whispered.
Sarah listened with her ear close to the crack of the kitchen door when her daughter opened the outside one.

She heard Thomas Payne's hearty greeting and Charlotte's decorous reply.

The door of the front room shut, then she set the kitchen door ajar softly, but she could hear nothing but a vague hum of voices across the entry; she could not distinguish a word.

However, it was as well that she could not, for her heart would have sunk, as did poor Thomas Payne's.
Thomas, with his thick hair brushed into a shining roll above his fair high forehead, in his best flowered waistcoat and blue coat with brass buttons, sat opposite Charlotte, his two nicely booted feet toeing out squarely on the floor, his two hands on his knees, and listened to what she had to say, while his boyish face changed and whitened.