"Ah, you Cotton, goodbye I say, and you señora, I say goodbye." With a deep bow he kissed the rough hand of the blushing country-woman. "Bueno." He turned with his kit bag on his shoulder, waved them an airy hand and was gone.
On the following Sunday Jan returned from a visit in the evening and found the house empty; Ann was out, an unusual thing, for their habits were fixed and deliberate as the stars in the sky. The sunsetting light was lying in meek patches on the kitchen wall, turning the polished iron pans to the brightness of silver, reddening the string of onions, and filling glass jars with solid crystal. He had just sat down to remove his heavy boots when Ann came in, not at all the workaday Ann but dressed in her best clothes smelling of scent and swishing her stiff linen.
"Hullo," said Jan, surprised at his wife's pink face and sparkling eyes, "bin church?"
"Yes, church," she replied, and sat down in her finery. Her husband ambled about the room for various purposes and did not notice her furtive dabbing of her eyes with her handkerchief. Tears from Ann were inconceivable.
The year moved through its seasons, the lattermath hay was duly mown, the corn stooked in rows; Ann was with child and the ridge of her stays was no longer visible behind her plump shoulders. Fruit dropped from the orchard boughs, the quince was gathered from the wall, the hunt swept over the field. Christmas came and went, and then a child was born to the Cottons, a dusky boy, who was shortly christened Juan.
"He was a kind chap, that man," said Ann, "and we've no relations to please, and it's like your name—and your name is outlandish!"
Jan's delight now was to sit and muse upon the child as he had ever mused upon chicken, lambs and calves. "O ah!" he would say, popping a great finger into the babe's mouth, "O ah!" But when, as occasionally happened, the babe squinted at him, a singular fancy would stir in his mind, only to slide away before it could congeal into the likeness of suspicion.
Snow, when it falls near spring on those Cotswold hills, falls deeply, and the lot of the husbandmen is hard. Sickness, when it comes, comes with a flail and in its hobnailed boots. Contagious and baffling, disease had stricken the district; in mid-March great numbers of the country folk were sick abed, hospitals were full, and doctors were harried from one dawn to another. Jan would come in of an evening and recite the calendar of the day's dooms gathered from men of the adjacent fields.
"Amos Green 'ave gone then, pore o' chap."
"Pore Amos," the pitying Ann would say, wrapping her babe more warmly.