The weedy patch had last year been sown with beet. Sparrows had eaten it—beet on that soil being, with carrots and spinach, a chance crop. Chalcraft was digging the weeds in and preparing to make a second sowing of broad beans. Pamela had not yet brought her reforming intellect to bear on the kitchen-garden; she thought vegetables very uninteresting.
The spade was deep in the stiff soil. The piece that Chalcraft had already turned up was wet and yellow in contrast to the hard gray of the untouched piece. Gainah watched him closely, as if he had been a stranger and digging was to her a new and intricate performance. She saw his bald head: there was a red, shining wen on one side. There were two careful patches, side by side and of a different color and stuff, on the back of his waistcoat.
“You’ve got another patch on the back of your waistcoat, Master Chalcraft,” she said childishly.
He spat thoughtfully, first on the palms of his hands and then into the trench where the weeds were buried. He looked at her—looked with the slow wonder of the aged, to whom nothing matters very much. Then he said, with a chuckle:
“Aye! so there be! Patch side by side look neighborly, but patch upon patch be beggarly, Mis’ Toat.”
She didn’t answer. She still stood in that wavering, uncertain way on the other side of the trench.
“The worms in this ’ere patch is past believin’,” he said, with an infantile slobber and chuckle, at last, stolidly chopping through the writhing bunches.
“It must be nearly dinner-time, Master Chalcraft,” said Gainah mechanically, with a steady glare across the trench with her pale eyes.
“Aye, that it be,” he returned rather nervously; “I’ve had mine.”
She turned and went back to the path. He stood and watched her. He was conscious, in his slow-witted way, that some queer change had come to her. The sun broke through the rain-cloud and touched the silver tip of his spade and the hard red lump on his head. He bent his back again and turned up slab after slab of sticky ground.