“What be ye a-doin’ of, Lethe?” asked Mink, restoring them, and setting the basket up on a bowlder.
To detail the simple domestic errand relaxed the tense agitation of their meeting, and it was a relief to him to listen.
“A-getherin’ wild sallet fur dinner,” she drawled, her happy smiles and tears together in her eyes. “Our turnip patch never done nuthin’, sca’cely, an’ ez we-uns ain’t got no turnip-greens I ’lowed I’d gether a mess o’ wild sallet. The chillen hone so fur suthin’ green.”
There was no quivering sense of deprivation in her voice; the hardships of poverty would wear to-day the guise of triumphant expedient.
“I hev got about enough,” she said, smiling up at him. “Ye kem on ter the house an’ I’ll gin ye a soon dinner. Ye mus’ be tired an’ hongry with yer travels. They’ll all make ye welcome.”
He hesitated. In the supreme happiness of the moment, his face had in a measure lost the lines that anxiety and suffering had drawn. But now, as he stood doubtful of what he should say, she noted his changed expression.
“Reuben,” she cried, in tender commiseration, laying her hand on his arm, “what makes ye look like that? What hev happened ter you-uns?”
“Waal,” said Mink, leaning against the wall of rock behind him, “right smart o’ different things,—fust an’ last.”
The simple heart’s-ease in being near her again,—he had not realized how dear he held it,—in hearing her voice, full of solicitude for him, in the renewing of his unconscious reliance upon her love, had begun to give way to the antagonism inevitable between them, with their widely opposing views of life and duty, their uncongenial characters and aims.