“I mean nothing of the sort. Why, she’s only a chit of a girl yet. ’Twill be time enough for Ruth to be thinking of courting in another ten years’ time.”
“Ten fiddlesticks,” quoth Jim, rudely. “How mich younger is she than yersen, I sud like to know.”
“Oh! that’s different,” I snapped.
“Aw dunnot see it,” said Jim; and we arrived at his mother’s house in Wrigley Mill Fold as nearly on the verge of a tiff as ever we had been in our long acquaintance.
Now I suppose it was because I was not quite easy about my own affairs that I had listened with less than my usual patience to Jim’s maunderings. When chapel loosed that morning I had whispered to Ruth that I wanted some private talk with her; and, our simple midday meal concluded, and the pots sided away, she had joined me as I sauntered expectant in the garden. I drew her away from the house, and then I poured into her ears the story of the events that had so strangely broken the even tenor of my life—not omitting the scene at the Wakes, in which Jim had figured so bravely.
“My!” she commented, “wouldn’t I just like to have seen Jim throw that gamekeeper head over heels. He’s a proper man is Jim. And so ’twas he after all rescued the poor girl from the brute’s clutches. Not but what she deserved what she got—what does she want trolloping about at Fairs and Wakes? Why can’t she stop at home and earn her living like a decent body?”
“Oh! Ruth,” I protested.
“Oh! you may ‘Oh! Ruth’ me; but it’s there all the same. She’s no better than she should be, I’st warrant. Men don’t go mauling lasses about in that fashion unless they’ve been led up to it by th’ girls themselves I know their artful ways,” she added vindictively. “And I suppose Jim’s head over heels in love with the girl. It always happens so in th’ story-books.”
“I don’t think Jim’s given a second thought to her,” I hastened to assure her, for I saw which way the cat jumped “It’s me,” I added lamely, stammering and blushing like the booby I felt.
“You, you!” she cried. “Oh! Abel, what will father say? I’ll be bound that’s what he was driving at with his Midianitish woman, and I thought it as that girl down at Slaithwaite. Somebody’s been filling his ears with a fine tale.”