"I'll see about the dinner."
Slightly frowning, Theresa looked at Alexander. "Must I stay?"
"I thought, if you would, I'd take you afterwards to a place I know. Will you come? It's a fine place."
"I'd like to come," she said.
Janet fetched food from the larder while Laura, the little maid, with her arms bare beyond the elbow, laid the table and cast casual remarks at Alexander in a pretty monotone. She herself was pretty, but Alexander, reading again, hardly looked at her. He murmured his assents and "no's" and interjections into the book, while she told him how someone in the village had driven into town, and the white horse had fallen and cut its knees, and it was a good horse and a new one. "So they'll have to bide home till its knees are mended, and that's awkward for them with their coal and all to fetch."
"Ye-es," said Alexander. "It'll be hard work fetching the coal by hand."
"They'll never do that!" she exclaimed, and laughed as she saw the queer raising of his brows.
Theresa was unreasonably angered by these pleasantries. She wanted to tell Alexander he was not funny at all, that she could be much funnier herself; but he had returned to his reading with so little apparent satisfaction in his mild joke that she forgave him. Moreover, she liked the way his head rose from his neck, and the line of his chin; he had a manner of touching books that pleased her, and on small likes and dislikes Theresa could hang a serious mood.
A little later, with the dogs leaping round them, they set out together by the front door of the house, and Theresa turned among the larches to wave farewell to Janet, who stood looking after them with her strange passivity.
But to-day, below the quiet of her face, she was feeling all the tragedy of her lost youth and her empty arms. These she folded across her breast and pressed heavily against her heart to still the pain, and, in the trouble of a mother who has had no lover but her son, she saw the shadows drop back into their places as the two figures passed through and on. And she stood there, rigid, with the hurt smile on her lips, until the dogs came back and lay down at her feet, with lolling tongues.