“You're balm enough yourself, Nancy, for a quiet husband. But lend me a hould of the bellows there—I'll blow up like blazes.”
Cæsar came into the house on the top of this commotion, grumbling as he stepped over the porch, “The wind has taken half the stacks of my haggard, mother.”
“No matter, sir,” shouted Pete. “The best of your Melliah is saved upstairs.”
“Is she herself?” said Cæsar. “Praise His name!”
And over the furious puffing and panting and quacking of the bellows and the cracking and roaring of the fire, the voice of Pete came in gusts through the floor, crying, “I'll go mad with the joy! I will; yes, I will, and nobody shall stop me neither.”
The house, which seemed to have been holding its breath since the storm, now broke into a ripple of laughter. It began in the kitchen, it ran up the stairs, it crept through the chinks in the floor, it went over the roof. But Kate lay on her pillow and moaned, and turned her face to the wall.
Presently Nancy Joe appeared in the bedroom, making herself tidy at the doorway with a turn of the hand over her hair. “Mercy on me!” she cried, clapping her hands at the first sight of Kate's face, “who was the born blockhead that said the girl's wedding was as like to be in the churchyard as in the church?”
“That's me,” said a deep voice from the middle of the stairs, and then Nancy clashed the door back and poured Pete into Kate in a broadside.
“It was Pete that done it, though,” she said. “You can't expect much sense of the like, but still and for all he saved your life, Kitty. Dr. Mylechreest says so. 'If the girl had been lying out another hour,' says he——And, my goodness, the fond of you that man is; it's wonderful! Twisting and turning all day yesterday on the bottom step yonder same as a live conger on the quay, but looking as soft about the eyes as if he'd been a week out of the water. And now! my sakes, now! D'ye hear him, Kirry? He's fit to burst the bellows. No use, though—he's a shocking fine young fellow—he's all that.... But just listen!”
There was a fissing sound from below, and a sense of burning. “What do I always say? You can never trust a man to have sense enough to take it off. That's the kettle on the boil.”