She laughed back at him and his hesitation, triumph and good-humoured affection mingled on her countenance.
“You’d no need to let on.... It was plain enough, I’m sure! I’ve known for a long while now you were thinking a deal about it.”
“Ay, well, it’d be queer if you hadn’t, I suppose,—you’re that sharp! But I’ve often thought I’d like to take a look in and see how the lads were framing.”
“You’ll be seeing how all right before you’re a couple of months older!...” She got to her feet, too, and began sweeping the pots together in a series of joyous movements. “Eh, but I hardly know how to hold myself in about it! I was fair tongue-tied, last night, when you said as we’d best go, but I’m that full of it all to-day, I can’t keep it from wagging! What, I’ve been clacking to the furniture all morning for want of anything better,—telling it all about it as if it was human beings! You’d have laughed fit to crack if you’d seen the way I went on. Len Machell popped in for a word and catched me doing it, and he looked scared out of his life!”
He stiffened a little at Machell’s name, feeling a cold wind blow in upon him and his manufactured enthusiasm. As before, the situation had remained more or less in the air until Len touched it; but as soon as he laid a finger upon it, it became concrete.... He said “Machell?” after her, not as a question, but as if weighing a sound which, in the space of a morning, had grown sinister and threatening. But she took no notice.
“I was making pretence this house was Over There, and the furniture was the lasses and lads. ‘Eh, Ellen, my girl,’ says I, hugging the grandfather clock, ‘I’m that glad to see you I could cry!’... ‘And is this little Sally?’ I says, kissing yon little stool. ‘She’s grown rarely since her last photo!’ Right daft I must have looked, and no mistake, but I couldn’t help it. I was that chock with it all I had to get shot of it, one way or another.”
She was laughing and crying as she talked, busy living over again the absurd scene which had yet been so vivid and poignant, but for once she did not receive the kindly smile with which he usually rewarded her attempts at humour. Instead, he turned away from her again, almost as if he had been wounded and wished to hide it.
“What was Len doing, hanging about the place?” he enquired, surprising her both by his words and by his faintly-sharp tone, for he was a lenient master with his men.
“Nay, what, he was only in the house half a minute or so! You’ve no call to be vexed with him, I’m sure. He just looked in to say you’d told him we were leaving, and to ask if there was anything he could do. He said his missis would be glad to come up any time to lend a hand with the packing, so I said the sooner we set about it, the better.”
“I never told him we were going,” Kirkby said, in the same almost angry tone, making her stare again. “It was him as said it.... He said it was all over the spot, and had been for long; and he wanted to know if it was true.”