"Won't you?"
Sophie put her arms around Martha's neck from behind her chair. She pressed her face against the creases of Martha's sunburnt neck and kissed it.
Martha gurgled happily under the pressure of Sophie's young arms, the childish impulse of that hugging. She turned her face back and kissed Sophie.
"Oh, my lamb! My dearie lamb!" she murmured.
She recognised Sophie's need for common and kindly service to the people of the Ridge. She knew what that service had meant to her at one time, and was willing to let Sophie share her ministry so long as her health was equal to it.
Mrs. Watty, and the women who took their views from her, thought that Sophie was giving herself a great deal of unnecessary and laborious work as a sort of penance. They had withdrawn all countenance from her after the disaster of the ball, although they regarded her marriage to Potch as an endeavour to reinstate herself in their good graces. Mrs. Watty had been scandalised by the dress she had worn at the ball, by the way she had danced, and her behaviour generally. But Sophie was quite unconcerned as to what Mrs. Watty and her friends thought: she did not go out of her way either to avoid or placate them.
When she went to the Crosses' to take charge of the children and look after the house while Mrs. Cross was ill, the gossips had exclaimed together. And when it was known that Sophie had taken on herself odds and ends of sewing for other women of the township who had large families and rather more to do than they knew how to get through, they declared that they did not know what to make of it, or of Sophie and her moods and misdemeanours.
Potch heard of what Sophie was doing from the people she helped. When he came home in the evening she was nearly always in the kitchen getting tea for him; but if she was not, she came in soon after he got home, and he knew that one of these little tasks she had undertaken for people in the town had kept her longer than she expected. Usually he hung in the doorway, waiting for her to come and meet him, to hold up her face to be kissed, eyes sweet with affection and the tender familiarity of their association. Those offered kisses of hers were the treasure of these dream-like days to Potch.
He had always loved Sophie. He had thought that his love had reached the limit of loving a long time before, but since they had been married and were living, day after day, together, he had become no more than a loving of her. He went about his work as usual, performed all the other functions of his life mechanically, scrupulously, but it was always with a subconscious knowledge of Sophie and of their life together.
"You're tired," he said one night when Sophie lifted her face to his, his eyes strained on her with infinite concern.