“I don’t half like to say it out loud!”
“Whisper, then,” he said gayly, “and give a man a chance to kiss a pretty neck!”
“Behave yourself! But stoop down. You be so tall.”
He stooped, and she whispered, and the whisper sent him off into a guffaw of laughter.
“Ha, ha, ha! Well, to-be-sure!” He slapped his thigh and roared himself red in the face, and she laughed with him, though in demurer fashion. “Whew! that beats all! So Jason be in love, after all his cursing o’ females, and wishing as the Almighty had seen fit to people the world without the help of petticoats. But who’s the maid, if it be a maid, and what’s her mind to him, seemingly? Will she swallow the mortal down, with a hold on her nose? or turn it up, and bid him get to windward with that mug of his, as a New Zealand idol might be jealous of? Come, give her a name! or I’ll say you grudge her her good fortune!”
“You gave her your own, not so long back!”
“You don’t mean yourself?”
Convinced by Nelly’s blushes as by her laughter that she did mean herself; a purple hue swamped the trooper’s florid countenance and a weakness took him in the knees. He rocked awhile, holding his blue-cloth-covered ribs, and then his laughter broke away with him, and wakened echoes that the barrack-room knew, but that the blackened, cobwebbed rafters of the ancient barn had not echoed to since a roaring bachelor squire of the soldier’s name had held Harvest Home there in the dead old days when the Second George was King.
Nelly checked him when he reached the climax of gasping speechlessly and mopping his overflowing eyes. He crowed out:
“Well, that bangs the best! And what did you do when he made up to ’e? Comb his hair wi’ a muck-fork or curtsey and thank him kindly for his damned presumption?”