The girl had been walking towards me, swinging by its riband a garden hat, for the air was hot. The dog ran to her, with a bark that might have been of reassurance. She stopped, and, with a pretty shyness far short of embarrassment, said:
"Are you better now, poor man?"
I mumbled something, I know not what, and she smiled and passed on.
Then I felt I would have given anything to live that moment again.
"Dolt! Fool! Jackass!" I called myself. "What a baby she must think me! 'Poor man!' she said. Good heavens! Does she think I am forty?"
And thus fuming at my tongue-tied awkwardness, I went along the path.
I walked up and down for some time, and was still pacing along with my back to the house, when I heard a light footstep behind me, and for a foolish moment fancied it was the girl whose aspect and kind words had lately put me in such a commotion. But on turning about, I felt relief and disappointment mingled (the disappointment was, I think, the greater) to see that it was only Susan.
"Measter wants tha," she said.
I stepped along in silence beside her, she taking three steps for my one, and giggling to sicken a man.
"Tha'lt never get a sweetheart," she said by and by.