George made no reply, but his face lowered.
“Perhaps she didn’t like you either,” continued Rhys, in whom the long morning spent underground was rankling. “I’m sure I don’t wonder. They like a man that can give them some sort of a decent home, to say nothing of the rest. However, there are always some thankful enough for a man’s name to hide behind. You might get one that was——”
“Hold your foul tongue!” broke in Williams.
Rhys laughed. “Ha! I was right, was I? I knew well enough you’d been courting and it had come to no good. My God! Fancy a man like you trying to take up with a woman! What did you say to her, Williams? How did you begin?”
At this moment the sprig of holly fell out of George’s coat. Rhys stepped forward to pick it up, and the sheep-stealer put his foot upon it, grazing Walters’ finger with the nails in his boot.
“I mayn’t touch it, I see. I suppose you’d like me to think she gave it you.”
George was shaking with rage. The mortification in his heart was hard enough to endure without his companion’s sneers, and the Pig-driver had already exasperated him. He knew that Rhys was as a man drawing a bow at a venture, but his shots were going perilously near to the mark.
“I don’t care what you think,” he said. “Get down the ladder, you fool!”
“Fool, am I? Fool? You can stop that. It’s enough to have to live with an oaf, let alone being called a fool by him.”
“If it hadn’t been for me you’d have been living somewhere pretty different—or maybe you mightn’t be living at all,” said Williams. Anger was beginning to lend him a tongue.