Evan glanced at Gabriel, but the old man did not see him, for he was staring at the floor.
“Lad, could ye?” Maggie demanded again.
“Yes, Maggie,” Evan answered, “we will keep a home for you as long as you live. You shall have Isgubor Newydd—see, I will give it to you. You shall have a deed of it.”
“There,” said Maggie, “of course, tell father now, an’—an’ I hope he’ll want to stay.”
[The Choice]
I
Keturah, leaning towards the open grate of coals in the cheerful kitchen of the Reverend Samson Jones, rubbed up and down, up and down her old shin; so rhythmical was the motion that she might have been sousing or rubbing clothes, except for a polyphonic “Ow! Ow!” to set off the rubbing. Keturah knew better than to quarrel with fate. But when the latch lifted she looked up eagerly, with that instinctive hunger for sympathy upon which most of the satisfaction of joy or the pleasure of pain depends. It was Deb, the widow Morgan’s servant, and Keturah groaned afresh with the joyous sense of having from all the world just the audience she would have chosen for her misery.
“Ow, ow!”