Ned looked at her, for a wonder, distastefully.
"Do you mean," he said, "that you didn't expect to see me again?"
Martha grew red, then white. "So sure as my name's Martha Higgins," she began tearfully, "If I'd expected your lordship wasn't playin' the back-step----"
He interrupted her calmly. "I'm sorry to say it, Martha, but I think you are a fool," he said calmly, and left her collapsed in a chair crying silently, not so much for herself as for him; since she had seen the tragedy of his face.
Adam Bate, coming in ten minutes later, found her so, and being diffident of his power to console, crept away again to administer comfort to a newly calved cow who was lowing for her young one.
"Coo-up, Coo-ep, m'dear," he said, wisping its back with a handful of straw, "th' shallt 'ave it for sure when th' bags full, so set th' mind to the makin' o' milk. See! there's a bit o' mangle fur 'ee, but mind 'ee 'to whom much is given of them shall much be requir-ed,' as passon says. So--'pail-full, cauf-full.' Think o' that an' dinnot squander God's strength on booin'."
He felt inclined to read some such moral lesson to Martha when he returned to find her in no better case, the fire dwindling and no sign of tea; but, as has been said, he felt diffident. So he contented himself with laying the tea, poking up the fire and putting on the kettle, accompanying these unwonted actions with the hissing noise which grooms use, apparently as an encouragement to their own ardour. Perhaps this aided him to courage; perhaps the presence of death in the house taking him back to fundamentals roused in him a revolt of vitality, a desire to secure safety in equilibrium; anyhow, after a time, he sat himself down in a kitchen chair, and scrooped it by excruciating half-inches towards Martha's, until they almost touched.
"Martha, woman!" he said tentatively, "If this sort o' thing's goin' on--If you 'urns goin' to be taken, this no supper, no tea way, as you 'urn bin doin' o' late--why there ain't nothin' for it but ter marry me, as doan't forgit them things."
Martha shook her head forlornly. "It--it'll have to come to that in the end, I sippose," she sobbed.
You might have knocked Adam down with a feather. After all these fourteen years to be even so grudgingly accepted as this, made him feel that the round world was no longer sure. He sat with his mouth wide open, wondering what topic of conversation would in the future take the place of unending proposal and refusal. Then the sense that he must leave such dark things to Providence, and do his duty in the present by himself, and Martha made him ask tremulously--