“You’ll get wet,” he said reluctantly—“we should ought to move.”
“I don’t care—I don’t want to move. Let me stay like this.”
“Then you aren’t angry with me for——”
“Why should I be?”
“Well, we aren’t long acquainted....”
§ 18
During the next two months Jenny grew sweetly familiar with that strip of marsh between the hop-gardens and the River Tillingham. The Mocksteeple, standing out on the hill above the river’s southward bend, had become one of many joyful signs. Once more the drab, ridiculous thing looked down on Alard loves, though now it was not a cynical Alard Squire making sport of the country girls, but an Alard girl tasting true love for the first time with a yeoman. Her earlier love affairs, even that latest one with Jim Parish, became thin, frail things in comparison.
Godfrey was contemptuous of Jim.
“He couldn’t have loved you, or he’d never have let you go. He’d have let his place go first.”
“Would you let Fourhouses go for me, Ben?”