"Then I will meet you no more if I spoil your work," she said gravely.
"There spoke the child. All the severity of the little monitor of yore is in those accents," he replied with a laugh. "No, Meg, I work all the better to earn my play."
"Your play?" she said slowly, with a slight emphasis on the word; and she was silent awhile. The expression remained with her, casting its little shadow of doubt, and she would harp back upon it.
"Is this your play?" she would question gravely, when he said anything complimentary.
They had their merry wrangles, their desperate fallings-out, their pretty makings-up. Meg, with characteristic repartees, parried his thrusts, and their intercourse was sweet with wholesome laughter. With a blunt playfulness she met anything approaching to sentiment.
"While I was waiting," he said one day, "there was a little bird up there—you'll hear it—which continually says, 'She'll come! she'll come!'"
"And I heard a cuckoo in the wood as I came along," she replied; "he cried nothing but 'Copy! copy! copy!'"
"It must have been the printer's devil," he said, "when I was taking a holiday."
An innocent coquetry, which was the simple outcome of delight in her ever-growing happiness, would tinge her manner with a little salt of aggressiveness. She sometimes played at making him jealous.
She was late one day; she had been detained, she explained, by a fascinating being.