“Then don’t go there. I wish you could keep away from that place for a little bit, then you might forget her. And if you couldn’t,” added the astute Llewellyn, “after all, she will be there for ever so long and you will have plenty of chances of going to Hereford when she returns to her aunt. Try, Harry.”
The younger brother’s influence had always been so strong that the elder was never entirely free from it; he had looked at things for so many years of boyhood through Llewellyn’s eyes, that he had never quite lost the habit, though the separation which manhood brought them had weakened it a little.
“Well, I shan’t have any pretext for going to Crishowell for some time,” he said slowly. “You’ve made me rather miserable.”
Llewellyn said no more, but he felt that he had gained something.
[CHAPTER XV
THE BEGINNING]
GEORGE WILLIAMS’ education had been a very elementary and spasmodic thing. In days of comparative prosperity, when he was a small boy, he had learned to read and write and add up a little, but his mother’s widowhood had sent him out to field-work at an age when the village urchins of the present day are still wrestling with the fourth “standard.”
That most irksome of all tools, the pen, was lying before him on the box which served as a table, and he stared sorrowfully at it and the cheap ink-pot beside it; now and then he took himself sternly by the front hair as though to compel his brain to come to the assistance of his hand.
The cottage was very quiet, and the door stood open to let in what remained of the afternoon light. Below Rhys, who had spent the whole of the preceding night out of doors, was making up for lost sleep upon his pile of sheepskins, for, since his recovery, Williams’ bedding had been restored to its rightful place. The brook gurgled outside. He shoved the paper away impatiently and sat back in his chair. All his efforts had only resulted in two words which faced him on the otherwise blank sheet. He laid his unlighted pipe down on them, for he heard Rhys’ footsteps upon the ladder below the flooring, and he did not want him to see what he had written. The two words were “Dere Mary.”
The composition of this letter had hung over him for some days, for, besides his poor scholarship, he was one of those people whose powers of expression are quite inadequate to their need of expressing. He knew this very well, and it depressed him a good deal. He had made up his mind to ask Mary Vaughan to be his wife.