“Ay, I see your face,” she answers, with a note of tenderness for the poor scarred cheek. “I hope you haven't been at the drink.”
He shakes his head with a little sad smile that twists up his one-sided mouth.
“Is it because you wanted to get shot of me?” asks the woman, with a sort of breathlessness. She has large grey-blue eyes with a look of constant waiting in them—a habit of looking up at the open door at the sound of every footstep.
“D—n it, Annie. Could I come back to you with a face like this; and you the prettiest lass on the Tyneside?”
She is fumbling with her apron string. There is a half-coquettish bend of her head—with the grey hairs already at the temple—awakened perhaps by some far-off echo in his passionate voice. She looks up slowly, and does not answer his question.
“Tell us,” she says slowly. “Tell us where ye've been.”
“Been?—oh, I don't know, lass! I don't rightly remember. Not that it matters. Up the West Coast, trading backwards and forwards. I've got my master's certificate now. Serving first mate on board the Mallard to Falmouth for orders, and they ordered us to the Tyne. I brought her round—I knew the way. I thought you'd be married, lass. But maybe ye are?”
“Maybe I'm daft,” puts in Annie coolly.
“I greatly feared,” the man goes on with the slow self-consciousness of one unaccustomed to talk of himself. “I greatly feared I'd meet up with a bairn of yours playing in the doorway. Losh! I could not have stood THAT! But that's why I stayed away, Annie, lass! So that you might marry a man with a face on him. I thought you would not know me if I held up my handkerchief over my other cheek!”
There is a strange gleam in the woman's eyes—a gleam that one or two of the old masters have succeeded in catching and imparting to the face of their Madonnas, but only one or two.