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“Take the lot, higgler?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he cried eagerly, and ran out to his cart and fetched a number of trays. In them he packed the eggs as the girl handed them to him from the baskets. Mrs. Sadgrove left them together. For a time the higgler was silent.

“No,” at length he murmured, “I’ve never been this road before.”

There was no reply from Mary. Sometimes their fingers touched, and often, as they bent over the eggs, her b
right hair almost brushed his face.

“It is a loneish spot,” he ventured again.

“Yes,” said Mary Sadgrove.

When the eggs were all transferred her mother came in again.

“Would you buy a few pullets, higgler?”

“Any number, ma’am,” he declared quickly. Any number; by crumps, the tide was turning. He followed the mother into the yard, and there again she left him, waiting. He mused about the girl and wondered about the trade. If they offered him ten thousand chicken, he’d buy them, somehow, he would. She had stopped in the kitchen. Just in there she was, just behind him, a few feet away. Over the low wall of the yard a fat black pony was strolling in a field of bright greensward. In the yard, watching him, was a young gander, and on a stone staddle beside it lay a dead thrush on its back, its legs stiff in the air. The girl stayed in the kitchen; she was moving about though, he could hear her; perhaps she was spying at him through the window. Twenty million eggs he would buy if Mrs. Sadgrove had got them. She was gone a long time. It was very quiet. The gander began to comb its white breast with its beak. Its three-toed feet were a most tender pink, shaped like wide diamonds, and at each of the three forward points there was a toe like a small blanched nut. It lifted one foot, folding the webs, and hid it under its wing and sank into a resigned meditation on one leg. It had a blue eye that was meek—it had two but you could only see one at a time—a meek blue eye, set in a pink rim that gave it a dissolute air, and its beak had raw red nostrils as if it suffered from the damp. Altogether a beautiful bird. And in some absurd way it resembled Mrs. Sadgrove.

“Would you sell that young gollan, ma’am?” Harvey enquired when the mother returned.

Yes, she would sell him, and she also sold him two dozen pullets. Harvey packed the fowls in a crate.

“Come on,” he cried cuddling the squawling gander in his arms, “you needn’t be afeard of me, I never kills anything afore Saturdays.”

He roped it by its leg to a hook inside his cart. Then he took out his bag of money, paid Mrs. Sadgrove her dues, said “Good day, ma’am, good day,” and drove off without seeing another sign or stitch of that fine young girl.

“Get along, Dodger, get along wi’ you.” They went bowling along for nearly an hour, and then he could see the landmark on Dan’el Green’s Hill, a windmill that never turned though it looked a fine competent piece of architecture, just beyond Dinnop.

Soon he reached his cottage and was chafing his mother, a hearty buxom dame, who stayed at home and higgled with any chance callers. At this business she was perhaps more enlightened than her son. It was almost a misfortune to get into her clutches.

“How much you give for this?” he cried, eyeing with humourous contempt an object in a coop that was neither flesh nor rude red herring.

“O crumps,” he declared, when she told him: “I am damned and done!”