A Pritchard cousin added, "In the dark! Weren't you terrified all alone?"
Olwen explained.
"Oh! With somebody," exclaimed another cousin.
"Sitting with a man from that place of yours.... In khaki, then? No; a sailor? Oh, how lovely!... How old; twenty-four—five? It must have felt just like being at the Cinema. Olwen, what did he talk about?"
"Asked me to marry him," Olwen replied, tranquil in the assurance that this unembellished truth would never be believed.
A gale of girlish laughter broke out round the table; a clatter of feminine questions.
The Welsh speaking-voice, which normally resembles the coo of the ring-dove (vide a paper on "Timbre" read by a college-friend of Professor Howel-Jones), is capable of rising, in excitement, above the corncrake note of the average Saxon, to the parrot-screech of the Continental. It did so now, as the stay-at-homes cross-examined their wanderer.
"No; but really?"
"Do tell us what sort of a young man he was?"
"Yes; come on, Olwen fach. We never see a young man down here; might as well describe to us what one looks like——"