She spoke in a tone of such despair that he burst out laughing at her. “You are a child!” he said, but his voice was too pleasant for her to take offence, and for the first time she knew the sweetness of being laughed at without minding it. “I feel sure of his sympathy,” she said to herself. “Though I came here believing that I disliked him, and even now I am not sure what I think of him.”
Richard Sotheby had gathered his brushes together, and was pouring water from the kettle on to the ashes.
“You will come and sit to me to-morrow, won’t you?” he asked. “And then we can go on with our discussion of your future. Come at half-past two, but now we had better go home separately, otherwise we shall see our names written up on Lambert’s Barn: ‘Richard Sotheby loves Anne Dunnock and takes her to the Burnt Farm.’ I wonder if they would put ‘the dirty dog,’ or ‘bless his heart,’ after my name? It is usually one or the other.”
Anne laughed at this, and looked the grocer’s son in the eyes, but his glance was one of mere amusement.
“Oh, they would put ‘the dirty dog’ after your name,” she said suddenly.
“You are quite right,” he said laughing. “Wonderful you should guess.” He did not offer to shake hands, and she walked away.
She had read the scrawls chronicling the loves of the village boys and girls, but she had never thought that it would be possible to speak of them. As she hurried home her heart was beating fast; she looked neither to left nor right, but kept repeating to herself: “Richard Sotheby loves Anne Dunnock, the dirty dog!” “But he doesn’t,” she added, wondering if she would wish to be loved by him.
Then she repeated as a variation: “Richard Sotheby doesn’t love Anne Dunnock, the dirty dog!” That was more like the truth! And she thought of the telegram she had seen him write, and wondered if he would tell her about La Grandison. Perhaps one day soon she would see her, alighting from a barge in the Seine that ran through a willow-pattern Paris.
There were no other answers to her advertisement, and as soon as the lying letter to Mrs. Crowlink had been posted, Anne was free to forget her problems. The week which followed passed happily enough; every afternoon she sat for an hour or more in the spring sunlight talking to Richard Sotheby while he painted her, answering his questions about her childhood at Ely, describing the poverty in which they had lived, and how her mother had been looked down upon by the ladies of the cathedral set, then telling him of her father’s eccentricities, and his violent temper, and of the last outburst when he had insulted a canon, and had been sent for by the Bishop, and of how he had been kept to lunch at the palace and sent away with the words: “I think you will do better by yourself, Mr. Dunnock. There is a living going begging at Dry Coulter. A hundred and twenty pounds a year....”
The pigeons cooed through all the afternoon, the pear tree burst into flower over her head, and was filled with the hum of hundreds of bees working among the scarlet stamens, at intervals Anne spoke of her life, and every now and then Richard would interrupt her with questions about her father. When she told of his love for the birds, Richard was delighted, and the rest of the afternoon was spent describing all his little acts of tenderness and consideration: scattering straw for the sparrows to build their nests, sowing teazles for the goldfinches....