At dusk every day, and every day in the year except Sunday, and year after year, the servant had brought the lights into Pedr Evans’s stationery shop, and, setting them down, had gone back into the kitchen. This evening, as she went into the room, scarcely knowing whether her master was in or not, everything had been so noiseless, she started, for there he sat, his head in his hands. Except for a slight disturbance when Pedr entered his shop, which it is probable no other human ear would have heard, there had not been a sound, until Betsan came in. Nelw’s “Nothin’, nothin’ at all” had been going around and around in his mind like a turn-buckle tightening up his thoughts, till it seemed to him they would snap. Then it would be, “What has she done? what has she done?” He had known her, in her sensitiveness, to exaggerate; she had confided to him some of the incidents of her childhood, which would have been taken quietly enough by other children. But he was unable to reason away the horror that looked out from her face to-day. And he, Pedr Evans, had asked the question that had brought that expression! A question suggested by a woman of whom even to think in the same moment was to dishonour Nelw. He wondered what it was that crawled into a man’s mind and made him to do a thing like that?
Betsan had barely closed the door into the kitchen, when, like the vision of the woman who tempted St. Anthony, Catrin Griffiths stood before him, the shrewd ogling eyes looking at him out of the painted face. The question, the answer to which was of more concern to him than anything else on earth, surged back upon him and stifled him and beat in his temples and his ears till it seemed as if he could not breathe.
Catrin coughed.
“Um-m, Pedr Evans, I forgot the envelopes this mornin’.”
“Well, indeed,” he replied mechanically.
“Aye,” she affirmed. Then asked, “Did ye see Nelw Parry this afternoon?” knowing that he had done so, for her room was opposite the Raven.
“Yes,” he said.
“What was she tellin’ you, eh, what? She’s not so unlike me, yes?”
Pedr looked at her, his mind at a bow-and-string tension of expectancy.
“She didn’t tell you, I see,” Catrin continued. “Well, may every one pity the poor creature! You’ll be wantin’ to know so——”