“And your cheeks, Martha,” he added, after a pause—“there’s some warm wind been at ’em, or they’d never look so bonnie.”
“Winds blow cold up hereabout,” said Martha demurely, setting down her pails. “And my cheeks are my own, Simon Foster, by your leave.”
Simon had known this game of give-and-take with a lass in the days before he grew harder and more keen on battle. He returned now with ease to habits forsworn until the Rising left him derelict among the women.
“Nay, but they’re not, as the bee said to the clover.”
“For shame, Simon—and at your age, too!”
“At my age! I’d teach ye I’m young if rheumatiz was not like a hive o’ bees about me.”
She twisted a corner of her apron, half hid her face with it; and Simon admitted to himself that the brown eyes looking into his “might be tempting, like, to a younger lad than me.”
“At my age a man’s just beginning to know women,” he said persuasively. “It takes a long ’prenticeship, Martha. You can learn to break in a horse, or do smithy work, or aught useful like, in a lile few years. But to learn the way of a woman—durned if it isn’t a long job and a tough job, Martha.”
“We’re very simple, if you men weren’t blind as bats at midday.”
“Oh, ay; you’re simple!” put in Simon, with a quiet chuckle. “Simple as driving sows to market.”