Mrs. Edwards looked up in the vicar's expressive face, and following the glance of his pleasantly twinkling eye, her own rested on her eldest son, carefully handing Cate Griffith over the tall stile.
She knew nothing of electricity, but certainly something like an electric shock passed through her, with its instantaneous enlightenment. A moment she stood dazed, then turned to address the vicar, but he was gone, and talking with a grey-haired old couple of a son who had been lost at sea, who had no grave to be dressed with flowers that Whitsuntide.
William was forgotten in the newer care. There was no mistaking the attitude, the tender expression in the face of Rhys, or the coquettish aspect of the ruddy maiden as she placed her plump brown hand in his.
'Sure,' said the widow to herself, 'Cate could get over a stile without help. I've seen her climb a tree or get over a wall before now. That's why Mrs. Griffith's been so ready to let Cate come to the farm to help at harvest-time, or whenever we were pushed. I see it all now, and the fear lest she should go home by herself after dark, as if the road did not be straight enough. And him a boy, not twenty yet. What do the woman be thinking of? Do she be thinking I would let Cate come on the farm as Rhys' wife, when Ales and Evan get married? Oh, Rhys, Rhys, and me a widow with three younger ones to rear, look you!'
Jonet and Davy, standing close beside her, during her brief colloquy with the vicar, had no clue to the significance of his hint or his glance; but they could read the trouble on their mother's puckering brow, without suspicion of its cause.
'What be the matter, mother?' asked Jonet anxiously, sidling up to her and slipping a small palm into the larger one. 'Do you be uneasy about Willem?'
''Deed, Willem's all right. The vicar said so. You need not fret over him,' said Davy placidly. 'He will be gone to show Robert Jones his new clothes.'
'Yes, yes, sure, that will be it,' assented the widow, smoothing her ruffled countenance with an effort, unwilling to share her discovery with either Davy or Jonet, although the former was by this time quite as old as Rhys had been when he felt himself entitled to assume a general protectorate of the family.
Taking Jonet by the hand, she made her way across the churchyard more hastily than usual, barely nodding in recognition of an acquaintance who advanced a step or so in expectation of a chat. Her desire was to keep Rhys and Cate in sight, and so confirm or dispel her newly-aroused suspicions.
But there were others before her at the stile, a father and mother, with three or four young children, to be helped up the steps on one side and down the other, and by the time her turn came, Rhys and the Griffiths were well in advance, and lost to sight by a bend in the road.