“Here's your tea, Dick,” she said.
“Thanks,” he said, taking it from her, and then with a quick look over towards the battery, “I wish you wouldn't call me 'Dick' when any of the hands are about; Lawson might hear of it, and I don't want you to get into any trouble over me.”
The black eyes sparkled, and the smooth olive-hued features flushed darkly in the firelight as she grasped his arm.
“You lie!” and she set her teeth. “A lot you care! Do you think I'm a silly? Do you think as I don't know that you want to sling me and don't know how to go about it?” and she grasped his arm savagely.
Haughton looked at her in gloomy silence for a few seconds. Standing there, face to face, they looked so alike in features—he wiry, muscular, black-bearded, and bronzed to the hue of an Arab, and she tall, dark-haired, with oval, passionate face—they might have been taken for brother and sister.
She let his arm free, and then, being only a working miner's wife, and possessing no handkerchief, whipped her apron to her eyes.
“You're a damned cur!” she said, chokingly. “If it hadn't ha' been for you I'd ha' gone along all right wi' Bob, and put up wi' livin' in this place; an' now———”
“Look here, Nell,” said Haughton, drawing her away into the shadow of the forge, “I'm a cur, as you say; but I'd be a worse cur to keep on this way. You can't marry me, can you?”
“You used to talk about our boltin'—once” and she snapped out the last word.
Haughton tried to explain why the “bolting” so trenchantly referred to did not eventuate. He was stone-broke. Ballantyne was going to do his own amalgamating at the battery, and it would be cruel of him to ask her to share his fortunes. (Here he began to appreciate his leaning to morality.) If she was a single girl he would stay at Mulliner's and fight it out with bad luck for her sake; but they couldn't go on like this any more. And the people at Mulliner's were beginning to talk about them, &c, &c.