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“Next Sunday?” she went no.

“I will, ma’am, yes, I will,” he repeated, “and thank you.”

“One o’clock?” The widow smiled up at him.

“At one o’clock, ma’am; next Sunday; I will, and thank you,” he said.

She stood away from the horse and waved her hand. The first tangible thought that floated mutely out of the higgler’s mind as he drove away was: “I’m damned if I ain’t a-going it, Sophy!”

He told his mother of Mrs. Sadgrove’s invitation with an air of curbed triumph.”Come round—she says. Yes—I says—I ‘ull. That’s right—she says—so do!”

On the Sunday morn he dressed himself gallantly. It was again a sweet unclouded day. The church bell at Dinnop had begun to ring. From his window, as he fastened his most ornate tie, Harvey could observe his neighbour’s two small children in the next garden, a boy and girl clad for church-going and each carrying a clerical book. The tiny boy placed his sister in front of a hen roost and, opening his book, began to pace to and fro before her, shrilly intoning: “Jesus is the shepherd, ring the bell. O lord, ring the bell, am I a good boy? Amen. O lord, ring the bell.” The little girl bowed her head piously over her book. The lad then picked up from the ground a dish which had contained the dog’s food, and presented it momentarily before the lilac bush, the rabbit in a hutch, the axe fixed in a chopping block, and then before his sister. Without lifting her peering gaze from her book she meekly dropped two pebbles in the plate, and the boy passed on, lightly moaning, to the clothes-line post and a cock scooping in some dust.

“Ah, the little impets!” cried Harvey Witlow.”Here Toby! Here Margaret!” He took two pennies from his pocket and lobbed them from the window to the astonished children. As they stooped to pick up the coins Harvey heard the hoarse voice of neighbour Nathan, their father, bawl from his kitchen: “Come on in, and shut that bloody door, d’y’ear!”

Harnessing his
moody horse to the gig Harvey was soon bowling away to Shag Moor, and as he drove along he sung loudly. He had a pink rose in his buttonhole. Mrs. Sadgrove received him almost affably, and though Mary was more shy than ever before, Harvey had determined to make an impression. During the dinner he fired off his bucolic jokes, and pleasant tattle of a more respectful and sober nature; but after dinner Mary sat like Patience, not upon a monument but as if upon a rocking-horse, shy and fearful, and her mother made no effort to inspire her as the higgler did, unsuccessful though he was. They went to the pens to look at the pigs, and as they leaned against the low walls and poked the maudlin inhabitants, Harvey began: “Reminds me, when I was in the war …”

“Were you in the war!” interrupted Mrs. Sadgrove.

“Oh yes, I was in that war, ah, and there was a pig … Danger? O lord bless me it was a bit dangerous, but you never knew where it was or what it ‘ud be at next; it was like the sword of Damockels. There was a bullet once come ‘ithin a foot of my head, and it went through a board an inch thick, slap through that board.” Both women gazed at him apprehendingly.”Why I might ‘a been killed, you know,” said Harvey, cocking his eye musingly at the weather vane on the barn.”We was in billets at St. Gratien, and one day a chasseur came up—a French yoossar, you know—and he began talking to our sergeant. That was Hubert Luxter, the butcher: died a month or two ago of measles. But this yoossar couldn’t speak English at all, and none of us chaps could make sense of him. I never could understand that lingo somehow, never; and though there was half a dozen of us chaps there, none of us were man enough for it, neither.’Nil compree’ we says ‘non compos.’ I told him straight: ‘You ought to learn English,’ I said, it’s much easier than your kind of bally chatter.’ So he kept shaping up as if he was holding a rifle, and then he’d say ‘Fusee—bang!’ and then he’d say ‘cushion’—kept on saying ‘cushion.’ then he gets a bit of chalk and draws on the wall something that looks like a horrible dog, and says ‘cushion’ again.”