“’Tis different. It’s one thing or the other now. Oh! Mary, an’ I would be good to you.”
For reply she quickened her pace.
George struck at the bushes with the stick he carried. In spite of the good fortune of their meeting, in spite of the words that had set all right between them, they had slipped back into the old place. The sky had cleared indeed, but the clouds were rolling up again.
They arrived at the outskirts of Llangarth without exchanging another word or looking at each other; the girl kept her head turned away, with that uncomfortable sensation that we all know when we do not wish to meet the eye of our neighbour, and feel, consequently, as if we had only one side to our faces. When a steep street branched down to the market, she put out her hand timidly for the bundle, but he took no notice of it, and where the pavement narrowed, he fell behind, so that he might look at her unabashed as she went on before him holding the cottage bouquet close.
The town was unusually full, it being the day of a half-yearly fair, and Mary became almost bewildered by the stream of passers. Soon it grew clear that she had missed her way, and that the line she was following would eventually bring her out near the river, some way from her destination. George, who did not know the exact place for which she was making, kept behind; she tried to retrieve her mistake by a short cut, and, turning a corner, found herself in the very middle of the fair.
The place was a moving mass of humanity; country boys with their awkward gait elbowing about among the trimmer townspeople, girls in their best head-gear, lingering in groups in the attractive vicinity of a double row of booths bisecting the crowd. A merry-go-round, whose shrill pipes and flags assailed both ear and eye, creaked on its ceaseless round of measured giddiness, and behind it a drum, high on a platform, was being beaten with a certain violent decorum, which announced that the action was no outcome of the performer’s spirit, but part of a recognized scheme.
Far away from it a rival was found in a Cheap Jack, who proclaimed the merits of bootlaces, tin-whistles, coloured ribbons, and a stack of inferior umbrellas propped against the rush-bottomed chair which formed alike his rostrum and his stronghold. His assistant stood before him, keeping back the dense ring which threatened to submerge him, and using one of the umbrellas for the purpose.
The purely agricultural part of the fair had its stand on a piece of high ground, where some fat beasts with indifferent faces occupied a line of pens. In front of them James Bumpett sat in his cart surveying the exhibition. Farm-horses were being trotted up and down before possible buyers, the pig-jumps with which some of the young ones varied their paces driving the unwary back among their neighbours. Here and there a knot of drunken men rolled through the crowd, their passage marked by oaths emanating both from themselves and from those who were inconvenienced by them.
Mary started at finding herself on the verge of such a tumult, and turned back to George.
“This isn’t the road I thought,” she said, “I suppose I must have taken the wrong corner somewhere. I can’t mind the name of the street, but it’s nigh the market.”