May. Get off to your drunken sleep and to your dreams! Your dreams—your dreams—Ah, where is it as they have gone, I’d like for to know. The dreams as comed to I when I was laid beneath the hedge. Dreams!
[She gets up, feels down the wall in a familiar way for the bellows—blows up the fire and puts some coal on it gently. Then she draws forward a chair and sits down before it.
May. [Muttering to herself.] ’Tis my own hearth when ’tis all said and done.
[She turns up the front of her skirt and warms herself, looking sharply at Vashti Reed now and then.
[Presently Vashti’s eyes open, resting, at first unseeingly, and then with recognition, on May’s face.
Vashti. So you be comed back, May. I always knowed as you would.
May. How did you know ’twas me, then?
Vashti. ’Cause I knowed. There ’tis.
May. I be that changed from the times when I would sit a-warming of myself by this here fire.
Vashti. Ah, and be you changed, May? My eyes don’t see nothing of it, then.