‘Then we had better go in at once; we shall find her in the dairy.’
Mrs Crawshay was superintending the operations of three buxom maidens who were scalding the large cans in which the milk was conveyed every morning to the metropolis. Her ruddy face with the quiet, kindly gray eyes was that of a woman in her prime, and even her perfectly white hair did not detract from the sense of youth which was expressed in her appearance: it was an additional charm. She was nearly sixty. Her age was a standing joke of Uncle Dick’s. He had made the discovery that she was a month older than himself, and he magnified it into a year.
‘Can’t you see?’ he would say, ‘if you are born in December and I am born in January, that makes exactly a year’s difference?’
Then there would be a loud guffaw, and Uncle Dick would feel that he had completely overcome the Missus. The words and the guffaw were as a rule simultaneous, and if nobody happened to be present, it usually ended in Uncle Dick putting his arm round her neck and saying with a lump in his throat: ‘My old lass—young always to me.’
He had not the slightest notion of the poetry that was in his soul whilst he spoke.
Mrs Crawshay believed in young love. She had been very happy in hers. She had been brought up on a farm. Lads had come about her of course, and she had put them aside with a—‘Nay, lad, I’m not for thee,’ and had thought no more about them. Then Dick Crawshay had come, and—she did not know why—she had said: ‘Yes, thou art my lad.’
They had been very happy notwithstanding their losses—indeed the losses seemed to have drawn them closer together.
‘It’s only you and me, my old lass,’ he would say in their privacy.
‘Only you and me, Dick,’ she would say as her gray head rested on his breast with all the emotion of youth in her heart.