“Very well. You’ve got to mind a brace of things meantime; to make a vitty home for her by the sweat of your body, an’ to keep your hands off her till she ’m free to come to ’e.”
“Big things both, though I ban’t afeared of myself afore ’em. I’ve thought a lot in my time, an’ be allowed to have sense an’ spirit for that matter.”
“Spirit, ess fay, same as your faither afore you; but not so much sense as us can see wi’out lightin’ cannel.”
“Wonder if Uncle Joel be so warm a man as he’d have us think sometimes of an evenin’ arter his hot whiskey an’ water?” said Chris.
“Don’t ’e count on no come-by-chance from him. He’s got money, that I knaw, but ban’t gwaine to pass our way, for he tawld me so in as many words. Sarah Watson will reap what he’s sawed; an’ who shall grumble? He ’m a just man, though not of the accepted way o’ thinkin’.”
“Why for didn’t he marry her?” asked Will.
“Caan’t tell’e, more’n the dead. Just a whim. I asked her same question, when I was last to Newton, an’ she said ’t was to save the price of a licence she reckoned, though in his way of life he might have got matrimony cheap as any man. But theer ’t is. Her ’s bin gude as a wife to un—an’ better ’n many—this fifteen year.”
“A very kind woman to me while I was biding along with uncle,” said Will. “All the same you should have some of the money.”
“I’m well as I be. An’ this dead-man-shoe talk’s vain an’ giddy. I lay he’m long ways from death, an’ the further the better. Now I be gwaine to pack my box ’fore supper.”
Mrs. Blanchard withdrew, and Chris, suddenly recollecting it, mentioned Martin Grimbal’s visit. Will laughed and read a page or two of the story-book, then went out of doors to see Clement Hicks; and his sister, with a spare hour before her while a rabbit roasted, sat near the spit and occupied her mind with thought.