She had applied to Anice for instruction in this last effort. It was not long before Anice found that she was intent upon acquiring the womanly arts her life had put it out of her power to learn.
“I'd loike to learn to sew a bit,” she had said, and the confession seemed awkward and reluctant “I want to learn to do a bit o' woman's work. I'm tired o' bein' neyther th' one thing nor th' other. Seems loike I've allus been doin' men's ways, an' I am na content.”
Two or three times Derrick saw her passing to and fro before the window, hushing the child in her arms, and once he even heard her singing to it in a low, and evidently rarely used voice. Up to the time that Joan first sang to the child, she had never sung in her life. She caught herself one day half chanting a lullaby she had heard Anice sing. The sound of her own voice was so novel to her, that she paused all at once in her walk across the room, prompted by a queer impulse to listen.
“It moight ha' been somebody else,” she said. “I wonder what made me do it. It wur a queer thing.”
Sometimes Derrick met Joan entering the Rectory (at which both were frequent visitors); sometimes, passing through the hall on her way home; but however often he met her, he never felt that he advanced at all in her friendship.
On one occasion, having bidden Anice goodnight and gone out on the staircase, Joan stepped hurriedly back into the room and stood at the door as if waiting.
“What is it?” Anice asked.
Joan started. She had looked flushed and downcast, and when Anice addressed her, an expression of conscious self-betrayal fell upon her.
“It is Mester Derrick,” she answered, and in a moment she went out.
Anice remained seated at the table, her hands clasped before her.