"Please don't apologise," she said. "I am used to roughing it, and I like it."
He smiled, as he tucked her into the dog-cart, and remarked, as he climbed to his seat beside her.
"Collis Square didn't seem very rough to me."
"Ah! But you haven't seen me at work. I can lay bricks, mix mortar, point walls—it's delicious."
He laughed. "I feel sure you could do anything you tried," he said.
They drove on briskly, through a lane whose hedges were beginning to show bronze buds upon their blackness. The sky, after some boisterous sleet storms, was washed a clear, pure blue. A faint golden haze of willow catkins brooded over the adjacent brown copses, and the wet sparkles on the bare boughs threw back the sunbeams. Here and there the lazy reek from a cottage chimney hung pearly against the indigo fir woods—a typical English April, and a typical English landscape.
"Do you like this country?" he asked abruptly, and his tone seemed to imply that he thought anybody must.
She made a conventional answer that it was very pretty.
"Perhaps you don't care for scenery?" he inquired anxiously.
She turned to him laughing.