“Aye, he won’t, that he won’t,” affirmed Morto Roberts, wagging his head, and sniffing the pleasant odours from the browning light-cakes.
Dolly made no reply, but turned a cake with a dexterous flip, and pulled forward the teapot to fill it with hot water. The quiet glow from the fire mirrored itself equally in her kind eyes and in the shining brass pots and kettles of the flanking shelves, and was multiplied in a thousand twinkles on the glistening salt of the flitches hanging above her head. The table was already spread with a gaily-patterned cloth, and set with china bright as the potted fuchsias and primroses blooming in the sunshine of her windows. There was nothing garish about this humble dwelling of Dolly’s, yet everywhere it seemed as if sunshine had been caught and were in process. Warmth, odour, gleam, colour, and the soft heavy wind travelling by outside, made this the workroom of a golden alchemy. Dolly smiled with benevolence as she piled up the light-cakes.
“The fat’s snappish to-day; it sputtered more nor usual,” she said to Megan, who was seated in the shadow of the high settle.
“Aye,” responded Megan, in an irritable voice. “When I went by the house this mornin’,” she persisted, “I heard him singin’ some gay thing, a catch—singin’ in bed, indeed, an’ dyin’.”
“Singin’ in bed,” puffed Morto, “singin’ in bed whatever, an’ dyin’. Up to the last a-caper-in’ an’ a-dancin’ like a fox in the moonlight.”
“There, there!” Dolly objected again, filling Morto’s plate with cakes; “he’s been a kind man, a very kind man. There was Tom bach he put to school an’ clothed would follow him about like a puppy, an’ so would Nance, an’ so would his own dog.”
“Pooh! what’s that?” asked Megan. “Mrs. Rhys has had the managin’ of most everythin’, I’m thinkin’, an’ his houses he’s been praised for keepin’ in such fine repair, an’ the old pastor’s stipend—aye, well, ask Nance,” ended Megan, with a shrug of her shoulder, and a gulp of hot tea.
“Aye, well, ask Mrs. Rhys,” echoed Morto, “an’ ye mind it was the same pastor’s coat-tails he hung the dog-tongs to when he was some thirty years younger, an’ by twenty too old for any such capers. He’s an infiddle, he is, a-doin’ such things.”
“An’ ’twas he, wasn’t it,” Megan added, “who put that slimy newt in Sian Howell’s hat?”
“Aye, so ’twas, an’ she had a way of clappin’ her beaver on quick, an’ down came that newt a-hoppin’ on her white cap.”