There was a heavy step upon the flagstones outside the closed half-door that kept the expectant group of fowls assembled at the outer threshold from intruding into the kitchen. The upper part of a tall man’s body appeared over the half-door, blocking out the sunset. Its long shadow fell over the chopping-board and the widow’s active hands. She knew whose was the step, and her hands were arrested in mid-movement. Had her grim nature permitted it, she could have cried out with joy. As it was, a dimness obscured her vision, and the roaring of the blood in her ears drowned out the click of the latch as he came in.
“Joshua!...”
“How are you, mother?”
The tall, manly, soldierly figure, towering in the oblong of open doorway against its background of flaming sunset sky, farmyard, and stubble sloping to the jade-green river crawling between its frosted sedges, stepped to her and took her large, hard hand, and kissed her underneath the high, sallow cheekbone, with a duteous peck of lips.
“I am well, thanks be to the Lord!” said Sarah, regarding him unflinchingly. He was so like her dead husband, his father, that a wild surge of emotion strained the hooks and eyes of the brown wincey gown and swelled her lean throat to choking anguish.
“That’s right. But you always are well, ain’t you, mother? Bobbish, if not tol-lol? And Miss Nelly?” For she had entered at the moment, bringing the radiance of youth and happiness to illumine the somewhat gloomy farm-kitchen. “No need to ask how she is, if looks speak for anything! How do you do, Miss Nelly? Let me hope as you’ve not quite forgotten an old friend?”
“No, for sure! and I be nicely, Mr. Joshua, kindly thanks to ’e!”
With her quilted sunbonnet shading a face that the February wind, or some more ardent lover had kissed to glowing rosiness, from the widow’s hard black eyes, she put her pink hand in the hypocritical fellow’s large brown one, and gave him modest welcome.
So modest and discreet, even in those rigorous eyes of Sarah Horrotian, that the extraordinary snorting sound emanating from Jason Digweed, who, heralded by his characteristic perfume of pigsties in combination with unwashed humanity, had appeared outside the half-door, startled the widow as though a geyser, suddenly opening in the brick kitchen-floor, had been responsible for the utterance.
“Bain’t you ashamed, man?” she tartly demanded of the offender, “to make noises like the beasts that perish?”