“Well, old lady,” cried George in his free-and-easy manner, as he stood by the Welshwoman, and looked down at her nimble fingers, “so you have come all the way from Wales on foot, I hear! You put some of us to shame.”
She looked up and smiled pleasantly. She understood English better than she could speak it.
“Not on foot all the way,” she managed to explain. “On foot to the great steamer, and then on foot again after the steamer landed her in Scotland. Not less than a hundred miles of land, taking both ways together.”
“Oh, I see!” said George, perceiving that Margery had taken up a wrong impression. “But you must have been a good time doing that?”
“She had the time before her,” she answered, more by signs than words, “and her legs were used to the roads. In her husband’s lifetime she had oftentimes accompanied him on foot to different parts of England, when he went there with his droves of cattle. It was in those journeys that she learnt to talk English.”
George laughed at her idea of talking English. “Did you learn the use of the pipe also in the journeys, old lady?”
She certainly had; for she nodded fifty times in answer, and looked delighted at his divination. “But she was obliged to put up with cheap tobacco now,” she said: “and had a trouble to get that!”
George pulled out a supply of Turkey from some hidden receptacle of his coat. “Did she like that sort?”
She looked at it with the eye of a connoisseur, touched it, smelt it, and finally tasted it. “Ah, yes! that was good; very good; too good for her.”
“Not a bit of it,” said George. “It’s yours, old lady. There! It will keep your pipe going, on the road home.”