“Dear now; I see a dull prospect ahead if we use these long titles!”
“But—”
“Indeed, sir, please yourself. Only as I intend to call you ‘Jack’ perhaps ‘Delia’ will be more of a piece than ‘Mistress Killigrew.’” She dropp’d me a mock curtsey. “And now, Jack, be a good boy, and hitch me this quilt across the hut. I bought it yesterday at a cottage below here——”
She ended the sentence with the prettiest blush imaginable; and so, having fix’d her screen, we shook hands on our comradeship, and wish’d each other good night.
CHAPTER VIII. — I LOSE THE KING’S LETTER; AND AM CARRIED TO BRISTOL.
Almost before daylight we were afoot, and the first ray of cold sunshine found us stepping from the woods into the plain, where now the snow was vanished and a glistening coat of rime spread over all things. Down here the pines gave way to bare elms and poplars, thickly dotted, and among them the twisting smoke of farmstead and cottage, here and there, and the morning stir of kitchen and stable very musical in the crisp air.
Delia stepped along beside me, humming an air or breaking off to chatter. Meeting us, you would have said we had never a care. The road went stretching away to the northwest and the hills against the sky there; whither beyond, we neither knew nor (being both young, and one, by this time, pretty deep in love) did greatly care. Yet meeting with a waggoner and his team, we drew up to enquire.
The waggoner had a shock of whitish hair and a face purple-red above, by reason of the cold, and purple-black below, for lack of a barber. He purs’d up his mouth and look’d us slowly up and down.