“Young woman, check your tongue!” She added, with an afterthought of precaution: “And show me your marriage-lines.”
“My lines?...”
The trooper said, in answer to the puzzled knitting of the girl’s soft eyebrows:
“The paper the parson as married us ’scribed out and gave ye, Pretty.... The certificate of our marriage ’twas. The wife always keeps that!” He added, dipping his tongue in salt pickle saved over from a brief experience of the lower troop-deck: “’Tis our cable and sheet-anchor both in the stiff gale we’re weathering. Out with it, my girl!”
He looked to see her take it from the darling fastness of her bosom. A hand fluttered there, then dropped. The irises of the hazel eyes usurped the golden-brown-gray until they seemed all black.... A frightened voice said:
“Why ... I mind you taking o’ that paper to keep for me....”
“Nonsense!” he broke out, so roughly that Nelly winced, and faltered:
“But indeed and ’deed ’tis true!... Pray do, do remember! Think how I had no pocket to my gown, having made ’n on the sly in such a hurry as never, up to th’ garret where I sleep, working by the light of saved-up dip-ends hours after your mother had took th’ flat candle-stick away....”
Sarah’s gloomy front contracted ominously. Were not those dip-ends filched? Nelly went on, appealing to her moody, frowning lord:
“I were for putting the paper in my bosom.... ’Twas you said ‘Nay’ to that! So you took un and put ’n in th’ pocket o’ your pants.”