She laughed softly, and told him how afraid she had been earlier in the day.
At the sound of his mother's voice, Davey piped, wistfully. She went over to him and rocked his cradle for a moment or two.
"Hush, Davey," she said talking to him softly in her native Welsh. "We have company. There's one hungry man wants his supper, and another man, sick, that thy mother must make gruel for. Do thou sing to thyself, son, till mother is ready to take thee again."
But Davey had no great notion of the laws of hospitality that separated him from the source of all consolation. He wailed incontinently and from wailing took to uttering his protest with all the strength that was in him.
The unkempt stranger munching his dry bread by the table, glanced furtively at Mary's back as she stooped over the fire stirring the gruel; then he got up and went to the cradle. He lifted the child with awkward carefulness. Davey continued to wail, nevertheless, finding that it was not the soft covering of his mother's breast that he was laid against, but a harsh fabric, smelling of the sea, the earth, dank leaves and a strange personality.
When she took the gruel from the fire and poured it into a little bowl, her eyes rested on the stranger as he tried to appease Davey.
He was cradling the child in his arms, and muttering awkwardly, distressfully: "There now! There!" An expression of awe and reflectiveness veiled the sharpness of his features. "There now! There then!" he kept saying.
He looked up to find Davey's mother's eyes resting on him and laughed a little shamefacedly.
"I think he's forgetting his company manners, surely," he said.
"You're the first company he's had to practise on," she replied.