“Yes, it _do_ seem precious ’ard,” he repeated, but without looking at her, and his voice as he said it was hard as iron.
In a moment her whole attitude changed. She drew herself up, as though turned to stone, and looked at him quickly. The light was growing so dim in the lane that she could not see his face. But there was no need; the voice told plainly enough what the face was like, and immediately her tears were quenched, and the softness in her shrank away, as from a cruel gaze.
The afterglow was almost spent in the west, leaving only a warmer tone upon the marsh and a more metallic light upon the stream that crossed it; the moon, having risen out of the sea, was just level with the eastern down, and the pine-stems upon its ridge crossed the white disc darkly. Solitary figures coming from the mill on the hill’s crest, strayed across the brown slope beneath them, and a group of men and women returning to the camp sang snatches of song as they lounged along the road in the hollow.
“Good-night,” she said curtly. “I expec’ ye ain’t got nothing more to say.”
“No, I don’t know as I ’ave,” murmured he slowly.
But almost before the words were out of his mouth, Jenny was far below him on the steep lane, running as though for her life. He stood there, still with his cap in his hand; there was a lump in his throat, and he swore a quiet oath to himself as he watched her flit through the twilight.
The fires of the “foreigners,” that had burnt so gaily in the hollow, had all fallen to embers; the moon rode across an inky blue sky where the afterglow had so late been warm; the camp was dead silent.
Martin rose from the straw within his hut and came out into the night, for he was restless and could not sleep. He stood outside trying to take comfort in a pipe, and looking up at the eastern sky where the windmill still made the huge black cross on the blue. The stars were coming out, but the moon’s light was fitful and the marsh-land beyond the hop-fields was gloomy save where the stream was touched now and then into the brightness of a glistening snake. A little dyke divided the stubble-field from the meadow beyond it, where a white horse strayed in the dusk. Martin thought he heard the wailing of an infant, and then the dull crooning of a woman’s singing come from among the willows, and then he saw a girl’s figure pacing up and down with a little bundle in her arms. Presently the girl crossed over to the last hut in the camp, which he knew to be Jenny’s, deposited the bundle within, came out again, and, stretching her tired arms above her head, stood leaning a moment against the straw.