When his momentary rage had died down a great tumult was left in Terry's mind. The scene which he had just passed through had brought sharply home to him the attitude that the neighbors would take towards Bella's transgression. He pictured her to himself defenceless before her persecutors, and longed to give her the shelter of his arm and of his name. But could he offer to marry her still, and consent to be pointed at for the remainder of his life as the husband of a wanton? for scandal dies hard in the country. On the one side was ranged the whole force of a public opinion which it had never entered into his head to question until now, and of his own inherited racial instincts, and on the other his great love for this girl. He could not put it into words, but he felt dimly within him that it was she herself that he loved, and that her outward actions did not affect her inward essence, that he knew her better than any neighbor, and was a better judge of her than blind convention. He was not strong enough yet to be himself in the face of his world, but the balance wavered ever more deeply on the side of this new self that he was discovering. That he should have an opinion of his own at all was a great advance upon anything that he could have felt a year ago. But there is no forcing-house for the growth of character like disappointed love.
At the end of a fortnight he was still wavering in mind, but he could no longer rest without seeing Bella. So he put on his holiday suit, and went down the road towards her mother's cottage; but this time he did not wear the scarlet tie. As he approached the house he realized that it had a forlorn and neglected air, as though it shared the fallen estimation of its occupants; the grass grew thickly in the front yard and upon the thatched roof, and the geraniums upon the window-sill were withered and unwatered.
He pushed open the half-door and entered unasked, as was his wont. Bella was seated in the window, working at her sprigging and rocking a small wooden cradle with her foot; at the sound of his footstep she looked up with a strained hungry light in her eye, but at the sight of him a shade of disappointment flitted across her face and she continued to look past him over his shoulder as though expecting some one else. The old woman was seated on a three-legged stool crouched over the hearth while she stirred an iron pot of stirabout with a wooden pot-stick; she did not even turn her head when he entered.
'God save all here,' said Terry, awkwardly standing in the middle of the floor. His head nearly touched the blackened beam which ran across the middle of the room and supported a half-floor, whence the mingled smell of apples and dried onions came distinctly to his nostrils. He coughed and sat down upon the edge of the nearest chair, tucking his feet well under the rail and crunching his soft felt hat nervously in his hands. The swish of the thread being drawn through the embroidery was the only sound that broke the stillness, as he watched the regular sweep of Bella's arm against the window-pane.
'What's yer wull, Terry Gallagher?' snapped old Peggy abruptly, after a time.
Terry turned his hat over several times, examined the lining very carefully, and finally replied to her question with another:
'Why didn't ye let on to me yon time, mother, and let me marry her while there was time?'
At this heathenish question old Peggy rose to her full height and pointed the pot-stick accusingly at her daughter, as she said in a tone of concentrated bitterness:
'I wudn't let a wumman like yon soil an honest man's hearth.'
Bella sat unmoved, without taking the slightest notice of the words. Her mother and Terry belonged to a world outside of her which no longer affected her by their phantom movements.