“I thowt tha' ca'ed him a foo' a minute sin',” cried two or three voices at once. “Eh, Joan, lass, tha'st goin' t' change thy moind, I see.”
The girl's eyes flashed.
“Theer's others I could ca' foo's,” she said; “I need na go far to foind foo's. Foo' huntin's th' best sport out, an' th' safest. Leave th' engineer alone an' leave me alone too. It 'll be th' best fur yo'.”
She turned round and strode out of the group.
Another burst of derisive laughter followed her, but she took no notice of it She took no notice of anything—not even of the two men who at that very moment passed and turned to look at her as she went by.
“A fine creature!” said one of them.
“A fine creature!” echoed the other. “Yes, and you see that is precisely it, Derrick. 'A fine creature'—and nothing else.”
They were the young engineer and his friend the Reverend Paul Grace, curate of the parish. There were never two men more unlike, physically and mentally, and yet it would have been a hard task to find two natures more harmonious and sympathetic. Still most people wondered at and failed to comprehend their friendship. The mild, nervous little Oxonian barely reached Derrick's shoulder; his finely cut face was singularly feminine and innocent; the mild eyes beaming from behind his small spectacles had an absent, dreamy look. One could not fail to see at the first glance, that this refined, restless, conscientious little gentleman was hardly the person to cope successfully with Riggan. Derrick strode by his side like a young son of Anak—brains and muscle evenly balanced and fully developed.
He turned his head over his shoulder to look at Joan Lowrie once again.
“That girl,” said Grace, “has worked at the pit's mouth from her childhood; her mother was a pit girl until she died—of hard work, privation and ill treatment. Her father is a collier and lives as most of them do—drinking, rioting, fighting. Their home is such a home as you have seen dozens of since you came here; the girl could not better it if she tried, and would not know how to begin if she felt inclined. She has borne, they tell me, such treatment as would have killed most women. She has been beaten, bruised, felled to the earth by this father of hers, who is said to be a perfect fiend in his cups. And yet she holds to her place in their wretched hovel, and makes herself a slave to the fellow with a dogged, stubborn determination. What can I do with such a case as that, Derrick?”