"Going to see if the Dales are settled in all right."
"If you're not demented about those Dales I don't know who is. You'd better have taken my warning. That man isn't to be depended on. You'll be sorry some day."
"We shall see."
"Well, if you are, you can remember what I said. I don't know what in the world you can see to like in them. It's 'Dales, Dales, Dales,' morning, noon, and night with you."
Mrs. Cragg had only herself to blame if things were so. She could not see her husband cross a road without smartly requesting to be told his destination. This was her way of being wifely and confidential. If he opened a letter in her presence she demanded to hear the contents; and if he unlocked a drawer she wished to be told what he had lost. After forty years of undisturbed bachelorhood Mr. Cragg was reserved in his ways, and seven years of married life had not effected a cure. Perpetual questioning still gave him a succession of shocks.
He would not be easily betrayed into a loss of temper, which also means a lessening of self-respect, but he detested jars and arguments. The natural result of his wife's prying tendencies was in him a growing inclination towards secretiveness in small things. More and more he concealed in his own breast the things that he thought or that he meant to do.
He certainly was aware of an unwonted interest in "those Dales," as his wife called them. He liked the man, though Dale perplexed him, and he liked and was sorry for the girl. She looked so old and so serious for a child of her years. Not that Cragg knew her years; and he would have been surprised to learn that she had passed her sixteenth birthday. He supposed her to be about twelve or thirteen, and he often told himself that he would not like merry little Dot to look in eight or nine years like Pattie Dale.
Despite Mrs. Cragg's opposition, he did not change his intention of going to the house to see if his new tenants were comfortable; but he started in an opposite direction, simply to evade further remarks. It would be easy to work his way round outside Putworth.
The ruse was of small avail. Mrs. Cragg watched him go, and tossed her head.
"As if I didn't know!" she said aloud. "He's crazed about those people. He'll go to-night before he comes home if it takes him two hours to get there. He's as obstinate as an old mule, once he takes a notion into his head. We poor women have a lot to put up with in the men, and no mistake! Anyway, I'm sure I have."