"You know very well I would n't do that, anyhow," said Pam, with a trembling lip for the injustice. "And it 's wrong of you to say I would."
"Ah know ah 'm a bad 'un," said James. "Let's 'a my letters an' away."
"You 're not a bad one," Pam protested, with a more trembling lip than ever, "but you try to make people think you are. And some of them believe you."
"They can think what they like. Folks is allus ready to believe owt bad about a man," said the postman bitterly, "wi'oot 'im tryin'. Ah sewd 'ave seummut to do to mek 'em think t' other road, ah 'll a-wander, ne'er mind whether ah tried or no. Nobody 's gotten a good wod for me."
"I 've got a good word for you," said Pam.
There was silence over the postman's mouth for a moment, and in that moment his evil genius prevailed.
"Ye can keep it, then," he said ungraciously, swinging on his heel. "Ah nivver asked ye for it."
And the silence was not broken again after that. Pam went on sorting her letters steadily, but every now and then she turned her head to one side of the counter, and for each stamp on the envelope there were a couple—big, blurred, swollen, and rain-sodden, with a featureless resemblance to James Maskill about them—that danced before her eyes.
Only, later in the day, when there was no postmaster to prejudice matters with his presence, Pam heard James Maskill whistling the Doxology outside the door with his heel to the brickwork, and she slipped round and took him prisoner by his coat lapels.
"James..." she said softly, and the Doxology stopped on the sudden, as dead as the March in Saul. "You did n't ... mean it, did you?"