It drew near. In another moment it would be gone, and she be left alone to meet again the serious inscrutable face of the grey landscape.
But the cart—as it drew near—drew up, the driver tightened rein, and the rough brown horse stopped—his hairy legs set at a strong angle.
"Have a lift?" asked the driver.
There was something subtly coercive in the absolute carelessness of the tone. There was the hearer on foot—here was the speaker in a cart. She being on foot and he on wheels, it was natural that he should offer her a lift in his cart—it was a greengrocer's cart. She could see celery, cabbages, a barrel or two, and the honest blue eyes of the man who drove it—the man who, seeing a fellow creature at a disadvantage, instantly offered to share such odds as Fate had allotted to him in life's dull handicap.
The sudden new impossible situation appealed to her. If lifts were offered—well—that must mean that lifts were generally accepted. In Rome one does as Rome does. In Derbyshire, evidently, a peacock crested toque might ride, unreproved by social criticism, in a greengrocer's cart. A tea-tray on wheels it seemed to her.
She was a born actress; she had that gift of throwing herself at a moment's notice into a given part which in our silly conventional jargon we nickname tact.
"Thank you," she said, "I should like it very much."
The box on which he arranged a seat for her contained haddocks. He cushioned it with a sack and his own shabby greatcoat, and lent her a thick rough hand for the mounting.
"Which way were you going?" he asked, and his voice was not the soft Peak sing-song—but something far more familiar.
"I was only going for a walk," she said, "but it's much nicer to drive. I wasn't going anywhere. Only I want to get back to Buxton some time."