At this the girl tossed her head crossly.
"It appears like as if ye wanted to be back in the States ag'in," he continued, in a voice of anxious interrogation.
"My lands," exclaimed the girl, "but ye're green!"
To the young man this seemed such an irrelevant remark that he was silent for some time, striving to fathom its significance. As his head sank lower and lower, and he seemed to lose himself completely in joyless revery, the girl shot occasional glances at him out of the corners of her eyes. She had spent the preceding winter in a factory in a crude but stirring little New England town, and had come back to Nova Scotia ill content with the monotony of life in the backwoods seclusion of Wyer's Settlement. Before she went away she had been, to use the vernacular of the Settlement, "keepin' company with Jim-Ed A'ki'son;" and now, to her, the young man seemed to unite and concentrate in his person all that she had been wont to persuade herself she had outgrown. To be sure, she not seldom caught herself dropping back comfortably into the old conditions. But these symptoms stirred in her heart an uneasy resentment, akin to that which she felt whenever—as would happen at times—she could not help recognizing that Jim-Ed and his affairs were not without a passing interest in her eyes.
Now she began to grow particularly angry at him because, as she thought, "he hadn't nothing to say fer himself." Sadly to his disadvantage, she compared his simplicity and honest diffidence with the bold self-assertion and easy familiarity of the young fellows with whom she had come in contact during the winter. Their impertinences had offended her grievously at the time, but, woman-like, she permitted herself to forget that now, in order to accentuate the deficiencies of the man whom she was unwilling to think well of.
"My lands!" she reiterated to herself, with accumulated scorn, "but ain't he green? He—why, he wouldn't know a 'lectric car from a waterin'-cart. An' soft, too, takin' all my sass 'thout givin' me no lip back, no more 'n if I was his mother!"
But the young man presently broke in upon these unflattering reflections. With a sigh he said slowly, as if half to himself,—
"Lands, but I used to set a powerful store by ye, Liz!"
He paused; and at that "used to" the girl opened her eyes with angry apprehension. But he went on,—
"An' I set still more store by ye now, Liz, someways. Seems like I jest couldn't live without ye. I always did feel as how ye was too good, a sight too good, fer me, an' you so smart; an' now I feel it more 'n ever, bein' 's ye've seen so much of the world like. But, Liz, I don't allow as it's right an' proper fer even you to look down the way ye do on the place ye was born in an' the folks ye was brung up with."