The grip round her waist tightened and she laughed.
“If thou wert a wench, Hal, thou wouldst be a jade,” she said. “Come, Master Gilbot will be scuttering this way and that, and Mistress Sue, loath to leave Big French, will have the skin flayed off everyone in the place if we’re not there to help her.”
“Thou’rt a great lass, Anny,” said the boy, smiling. “When we are married there’ll not be an inn in the country to equal ours.”
The girl laughed happily.
“Ay, when we are married, Hal,” she said.
CHAPTER III
“Oh, I called her Mary Loo,
And she shwore that she’d be true,
Until I took to rum and went to shea;
Then she goed along wi’ he,
And forgot all love for me,
Sho I stayed wi’ me rum and me shea,
Sho I stayed wi’ me rum and me shea.”
GILBOT, landlord of the Ship, sat before a roaring fire in his comfortable kitchen, singing in a quavering, tipsy voice, and beating out the accompaniment with an empty pot on one podgy knee.
It was six o’clock in the evening, and already the tallow dips had been lighted. They cast a flickering, friendly glow over the scene, the long, low room, stone-flagged and small-windowed, the ale barrels and rum kegs neatly arranged side by side on a form which ran nearly all the way round the wall, and the two long, trestled tables, flanked with high-backed seats which were now unoccupied, but were presently to be filled with the best company that the east of the Island could provide.
Besides Gilbot, who appeared happily oblivious of all around him, four other persons sat in the Ship kitchen: two old men threw dice for pence in one corner, while in another, between two rum kegs, sat a girl. She was about twenty-three years of age, and, although her appearance was not of that uncommon type so marked in Anny Farran, yet she had a certain quiet comeliness and gentle expression which made her almost beautiful. At least the handsome young giant who lounged near her in an ecstasy of shyness appeared to think so, for he eyed her so intently, his mouth partly open, that she was forced to pay more attention to the garment she was patching than was strictly necessary. They sat in perfect silence for some ten minutes before the young man plucked up courage to speak. When he did, his voice came uncomfortably from his throat, and he reddened to the roots of his hair.