“I’m taking this along with me,” he remarked, “so you may just get down below again.” It was the first piece of active malice into which the other had provoked him.
As he went towards the village he picked a bit of holly from a bush and stuck it into his buttonhole. It added a good deal to his festal air, and the bright sun exhilarated him after the cold water he had applied to himself so copiously. The stolid gloom which seemed to surround him on ordinary days had lifted, and any one meeting him that morning and looking at him without pleasure would have been a dullard. He had health, strength greater than that of most men, and he was only twenty-eight years old. And he had a face that no living thing could doubt.
He hit out cheerfully at the dry little oak-apples in the hedge, for Rhys’ sneer had run off him like water off the traditional duck’s back, and been swallowed in the thought of its perpetrator tied to the underground room till his return. When generous people are goaded into malice they get their money’s worth out of the experience, and Williams’ little excursion into the devil’s dominions had done him a world of good. His prospects were no better than they had been on the preceding night, and he was about to try and hang an additional weight round his neck, but human nature and a spotted neckcloth will do wonders for a man sometimes, and the sense of well-being pervaded everything. Nevertheless, as he turned into the Brecon road, and met the toll-people on their way to Llangarth market, his spirits waned a little from pure fear of the matter in hand, and he stood before the door waiting admittance, sincerely hoping that Mary might not see how his hands shook.
Mary had determined on the answer she would give. Through all her wrongs and troubles she had set up a certain standard of right for herself, and she did not mean to sink below it; whatever her shortcoming in other ways had been, she had injured none but herself, and on none but herself should the reckoning fall. What preserved the strong tower of self-respect in her was that fact, and were she to lose sight of it, the whole edifice would crumble to the earth. In the terrors of the night, indeed, she had wavered and almost resolved to take the home offered without more ado, but with the new strength that comes to young lives with sunrise, she had put the idea away from her. No one else should pay, no one else should suffer, least of all George Williams who was her friend. She was thinking of him when she heard his knock, and opened the door to find him standing on the other side of it.
He walked into the house without waiting to be invited, and shut the door behind him. The blood tingled in his face, which was ruddy with the morning air, and the holly in his coat made a bright spot of colour in the room; his large frame seemed larger by contrast with the furniture.
“Will you please to sit down?” said she, mechanically pushing forward the wooden chair in which her father had been used to sit.
“Thank ye, no, I’d best stand,” answered George.
So they faced each other, the man with his back to the window. Mary had only seen him twice before, but a very definite idea of him had remained in her mind, and as he stood there she felt as though she were looking at a totally different person. He was younger, smarter, and it made her hot to think that she had leaned against his shoulder and wept her heart out in the circle of his arm. Then, he had been simply a protector, but now he had turned into a powerful-looking young man in a purple neckcloth. He had called himself her friend, but he was a stranger and she had no right in his life—certainly no right to spoil it with her ruined one. Her heart beat quick as she held the back of the chair.
“I’ve come to get the answer,” said Williams simply.
“I can’t! I can’t do it,” replied the girl.