However, he turned his present attention to Miss Fanny Kirke, who was forty-nine; and they discoursed pleasantly of the weather and the approaching holidays, and finally of Mr. Willie Kirke, who was playing popular airs on a concertina in the first waggon to lighten the way.
“He really seems able to do anything,” said Andy, with sincere admiration.
“Always could,” said Miss Kirke. “Tiresome about his meals, even as a child, wouldn’t touch suet pudding or animal’s frys of any kind; but made a windmill out of a card, a pin, and a stick of firewood when he was five. I heard Mrs. Stamford once call him quite the Admirable Bright’un, and indeed he is.”
Andy began to chuckle, then he turned it into a cough. Miss Kirke had not intended a pun at all, and she added in a very low tone, glancing at Mrs. Jebb’s gauze veil that floated like a banner from the next waggon—
“He is just the sort of man to be taken in by a designing woman.”
“Oh, I’m sure——” remonstrated Andy.
“Don’t tell me!” interrupted Miss Kirke, her refinement for once upset by what was the obsessing fear of her existence.
“I can’t think it possible,” said Andy, unable to pretend, in face of that eye fixed on the floating veil, that he did not understand the drift of her remarks.
“Anything’s possible,” said Miss Fanny Kirke with some bitterness, “when you get a widow and a man together.”
Then the waggons rumbled round that turning where there first begins to be a cool saltiness in the air, and little Jimmy Simpson called out, jumping up on a seat—