“I’ve got my living to work for,” said she. “I shouldn’t ’ave time.”
Then he took heart of grace—he came close to her.
“But if there was some one to work for you,” said he. “If we was wed, so to speak?”
She didn’t move, but her eyes grew startled, and then just a touch of hardness came back into her face.
“Ye didn’t say that up yonder,” said she.
“No,” he said, “I’ll allow I was startled a bit at first. But ... well, I know as you’re a good woman somehow ... and I love ye, Jenny—there! So if you can forget, well, so can I.”
She stood, with her lips parted, gazing straight out across the field—but a film of tears gathered slowly across her eyes.
Neither spoke, and the minutes sped by as in a dream, while the stars rained down their tenderness.
But as she stood there with that sweet seriousness of thought on her simple face, the babe, missing its lullaby, sent forth a piteous wail from within.
Then she sprang to its side, and snatching it to her breast and bending o’er it a face, tender as the moonlight that bathed her, she whispered softly:
A man and a woman stood in a country lane as the sun was setting. It was where the lane broke out into the open ground of the common, and above them on the hill a windmill was swinging gaunt, lazy arms against the sky. On one side it looked down and across the marsh to the incoming tide, and on the other it commanded miles of pasture-land and hop-fields, and saw the Sussex Downs roll away beyond: behind it, on a sky of opaque blue, the moon had just risen red, and looked at the setting sun opposite. The man stood ruefully, gazing up at the mill, his back half turned to the woman, who was talking fast and loud.
They were hop-pickers; not of those out of city slums, but of the tidier and better class who come from distant villages for the sake of the change and airing; there had been a gang of them, and they were all to be sent home on the morrow.
“But o’ course it’s enough for me to say I want a thing for you to gainsay me,” the woman was saying. She was a tall, dark, powerful young person, and the man, with his slouching gait and thin, sallow face, was evidently immeasurably her inferior in physical strength, and had a meek, deprecating manner that made her words seem somewhat of a mockery.