With which he left me to my soothing mechanical work in the shearing-shed.
I watched his figure (waisted as if he wore corsets always, though to do him justice he never did except for his masquerades) disappear across the farmyard to the red-brick house.
CHAPTER XXVII
A KITCHEN COURTSHIP
For the rest of the morning, turning steadily away at that wheel, I found myself wondering rather wistfully how things were going in there.
In spirit I saw the whole setting for this love-scene. Mrs. Price's back-kitchen with the big table, where she "put up" the dough for baking, set under the latticed window. The huge, hive-shaped "batch-oven" where I myself had helped with the baking last week. That oven had to be heated, early, by filling it with a stack of brushwood (some quite big boughs), setting the stack on fire, and leaving it so until the wood was powdery-ash, and the bricks of the domed oven-roof were white-hot. Then in went the loaves which Mrs. Price's tiny expert hands had shown us how to knead and to put up!
They—Mrs. Price and Elizabeth—had reached this stage of the morning's work by the time Colonel Fielding made his appearance in search of the girl he'd decided to marry.
What happened I heard something of later. (Not all.) Partly from Elizabeth, partly from him.
An odd courtship; so entirely War-time and modern! Yet going back hundreds of years; for what could be more old-fashioned than for the young man to seek his love among the warmth and the fragrance and the homely domesticity of the kitchen on baking-day! There was little Mrs. Price in her crisp grey overall with an old ivory brooch at her throat, busy and brisk and looking with every inch of herself "a Lady" in every sense, including that of the original Saxon "Loaf-ward." There was my chum Elizabeth helping her. With her hat off and her short thick hair rumpled about her small flushed face I expect she looked like a rather defiantly conscientious cherub!
To them, enter Colonel Fielding (with his blush!) telling Mrs. Price (with his usual shy charm of manner!) that he thought he'd like to come and help her, since he understood she'd got a busy day on.