“Ah, now, Mr. Richlin’, na-na-now, Mr. Richlin’, ye daurn’t say ud! Ye daurn’t!” She smiled and blushed and arched her neck and rose and sank upon herself with sweet delight.
“I say if I may judge by what he has said to me,” insisted Richling.
Mrs. Riley glided down across the door-step, and, with all the insinuation of her sex and nation, demanded:—
“What’d he tell ye? Ah! he didn’t tell ye nawthing! Ha, ha! there wasn’ nawthing to tell!” But Richling slipped away.
Mrs. Riley shook her finger: “Ah, ye’re a wicket joker, Mr. Richlin’. I didn’t think that o’ the likes of a gintleman like you, anyhow!” She shook her finger again as she withdrew into the house, smiling broadly all the way in to the cradle, where she kissed and kissed again her ruddy, chubby, sleeping boy.
Ristofalo came often. He was a man of simple words, and of few thoughts of the kind that were available in conversation; but his personal adventures had begun almost with infancy, and followed one another in close and strange succession over lands and seas ever since. He could therefore talk best about himself, though he talked modestly. “These things to hear would Desdemona seriously incline,” and there came times when even a tear was not wanting to gem the poetry of the situation.
“And ye might have saved yerself from all that,” was sometimes her note of sympathy. But when he asked how she silently dried her eyes.
Sometimes his experiences had been intensely ludicrous, and Mrs. Riley would laugh until in pure self-oblivion she smote her thigh with her palm, or laid her hand so smartly against his shoulder as to tip him half off his seat.
“Ye didn’t!”