“Do you know what ’tis she ’ave got to say to ye?” asked he.
“I can make a good guess at it,” said she, with a toss of her head and a short laugh. “Miss Crutch never got no courtin’ ’erself, and she don’t like them as do.”
“There be courtin’ and courtin’,” began Wilkins in a low voice, “and there’s a time for everythin’ ...” but she interrupted him passionately.
“There be folks as thinks a girl must needs be a born fool if she thinks fit to take her own way,” cried she fiercely, but there was a quiver as of tears in her voice. “But, Lor’ bless me, it be yourself ye’ve got to choose for, and ye must choose your own—come what may.”
“Ay, that may be,” echoed the man, and she was far too preoccupied to note the wistful way in which he said it. “But young maids can’t allers be ’spected to know all the ways o’ this wicked world. We’ve knowed ye a little ’un, ye see, and we don’t want ye to come to no ’arm.”
“’Arm!” exclaimed ’Melia impetuously, firing up at once; but he stopped her.
“Well, anyways,” he said quietly, “ye won’t be thinkin’ o’ courtin’ just now? ’Tain’t about that as Miss Crutch was wantin’ to speak with ye.”
“What then?” answered she moodily, as was not her wont.
“Maybe ye had best go up and see,” said he. But as she still stood still, with ruffled brow, uneasily twisting a piece of grass round her fingers, and as though meditating further speech, he added gently, “Yer mother be sick.”
The change was instantaneous. She did not say a word, but she flashed a quick, frightened look at him, and turned on her heel and fled. He looked after her pitifully as her tall figure flitted down the lane beside the wind-twisted pine-trees, behind whose red trunks the sun was setting in a sea of crimson beyond the purple downs. He watched to see if she would look for Miss Crutch, but she passed the oast-house by on her right, and ran straight on down the lane till she came to the turning that led to her home.
The moonlight fell into that lane the same night as the clock of the old Abbey struck its nine wavering strokes, fell so full upon it that the shadow of the pines lay hard and black upon its whiteness, and that the figure of a man sauntering leisurely along between its low stone walls was conspicuous as in broad daylight. He had come up from the camp in the marsh-land below, where the fires of those “hoppers” who were not villagers burned brightly in the still night; he left the oast-houses on his left, and before he came to the farm on the right he vaulted the low paling and made off across the down to the windmill. He was not an inhabitant or he would have known that that was not the shortest way from the plain to his destination. And there—on the slopes under the great spreading arms of the mill, with the dykes wandering rippleless across the plain below, like winding streams of molten metal in the moonlight—this man waited awhile patiently. He was not used to waiting, and the scene before him engrossed him but little, so that when the ashes of his pipe had burned themselves out and the moon was riding high in the heavens, he grew weary of the tryst, and slowly but surely incensed against the girl who had broken it. He was no beauty—many even said that he was an ugly chap—but he knew that he always got his way with women, and not infrequently even with men, and he never troubled himself to wonder why, and would have been very much surprised if he had been told that it was because folk were in a certain sense afraid of him—afraid not of his strength, but of his selfishness—of the selfishness that always managed to take that for which it had no intention of paying.