Jane started downhill after the lamb. “If they’re goin’,” she said to herself, with a shrewd look of understanding, “indeed, I’m goin’ too.”
“Baa-a!” bleated Gwennie, with little frisks and skips to right and left.
[An All-Hallows’ Honeymoon]
Intermittently the wind whined and raced, howling like a wolf, through the Gwynen Valley; and intermittently, too, the rain doused the bridge on whose slate coping Vavasour Jones leaned. It was a night when spirits of air and earth, the racing wind, the thundering water, the slashing rain, were the very soul of this chaos of noise. Still, cosy lights shone on either side of the bridge, the lights of Ty Ucha and Ty Usaf, where a good mug of beer could be had for a mere song to a man of Vavasour’s means. And the lights from all the cottages, too, for it was All-Hallows’ Eve, twinkled with festive brilliance upon the drenched flags of the street. Indeed, there was not one of these houses in all Gwynen whose walls and flaggings were not familiar to him, where Vavasour Jones and his wife Catherine had not been on an occasion, a knitting-night, a Christmas, a bidding, a funeral, an All-Hallows’ Eve. But to-night his eyes gazed blankly upon these preliminary signs of a merry evening within doors, and he seemed unconscious of the rain pouring upon him and the wind slapping the bridge. He moved when he saw a figure approaching.
“Hist! Eilir!”
“Aye, man, who is it?”
“It’s me, it’s Vavasour Jones.”
“Dear me, lad, what do ye here in the dark and rain?”