“I’m in trouble myself to-day. I’d be sorry to bring the same to anybody.”
Her expression changed at once; every trace of coquetry was wiped out of it in a twinkling. She came a step nearer to him.
“In trouble!” echoed she. “Now I am sorry. But p’r’aps ye wouldn’t care to tell, me being but a stranger, so to speak.”
“I don’t know as you’re so much a stranger,” he began, and then he broke off. “I ha’n’t got nobody but mother,” he added in a moment, irrelevantly.
“What, she ain’t sick?” cried the girl quickly, with real feeling in her voice.
“Got to go to the ’orspital,” answered Frewin shortly. “It’s her eyes. They say as she’ll be stone blind if she don’t ’ave su’thing done immediate. They say as it’d be coward-like o’ me not to persuade her to it, for it’s sarten-sure to be all right; but, Lor’, I ain’t got no faith in doctors.”
Letty was silent—most likely she shared his opinion, and could find nothing consolatory to say, but her pretty face was full of sympathy. He allowed himself one piece of comfort; he looked at it. Their eyes met, and hers filled with tears; but not before she had poured something into his that was not only sympathy.
“Good-day,” said he quickly, and in another minute he was hurrying down the road.
But the wager was won, though the village little guessed it, and though Letty gave that part of the matter never a thought just then—never a thought till Bank Holiday came and went without her having so much as a bit of a swain for the day—never a thought till the girls came up and laughed at her, and pitied her for having spent it sitting alone in the chimney-corner.
Then she thought of it, but not as they imagined. She did not tell them that she might have had the handsome miller for a “walking-stick” without any trouble at all—that he had laughingly declared he was in luck’s way, since he was like to keep the gloves and get her company as well, upon which she had tossed her head with all those old airs of supremacy which so forsook her in her intercourse with Bob Frewin, and told him that he might keep the gloves and welcome, but that her company he should never have again; she did not tell them that she might have been winning her wager that very afternoon, but that the young postman had been obliged to use this one day off duty to take his mother up to the hospital; she did not tell them, because she was doing her very best to forget she had ever made that wager at all.