“Dear, to be sure!” exclaimed Timothy, pausing; “you do seem in very good spirits, my maid.”
“Why, so I be,” replied the girl. “I han’t got nothing to make me sad, have I?”
“I don’t suppose you have,” said Timothy. “You was a-singin’ yesterday so gay as a lark.”
“Oh, I’m often singin’,” replied she. “I’d sing all day if I was let; it do help to pass the time away.”
“You can’t sing and scrub, though, I shouldn’t think,” said Timothy, tentatively.
“Can’t I?” retorted Ann-Car’line, and immediately dipped her brush in the pail and simultaneously lifted that marvellous clear voice of hers. It was a marvellous voice—fresh and true and ringing; she could send it up, up, to the very limit of the gamut, as it seemed, yet never lose sweetness or roundness.
“Can’t I sing and scrub?” she repeated, pausing to take breath and to soap her brush afresh.
“I never heerd nothin’ like it!” replied Timothy, enthusiastically. “Says I to myself yesterday, ‘It mid be a angel singin’,’ I says.”
“Oh, and did you?” said Ann-Car’line, growing pink with pleasure as she vigorously polished the doorstep.
“Yes, I did indeed,” returned the shepherd earnestly. “I should think you was a angel—or very near,” he added hastily, for at that moment he chanced to thrust his hand into his pocket, and came in contact with something hard and round.