She moved along the hedge, smoothing her brown hair down, and showing the muscles in her big brown arms.
“Come in, sir, and be welcome. Will, Will, you little frummet, what be you doing there, terrifying all of us with puddling round in the mud?”
She opened the gate for John Gore and gave him a curtesy, for Winnie Jennifer had served as woman in a great house, and her manners and her speech were less quaint that Mr. Christopher’s.
“Come in, sir; my man will be up from the ploughland soon. Dinner will be coming, though it be only rough stuff.”
John Gore dismounted, and made Mrs. Winnie a slight bow.
“You offered me your good-will,” he said, frankly, “and I have come to take it—as a friend.”
He led his horse toward the stable while Chris Jennifer’s wife bustled into the house, putting washing-day behind her with good-natured patience. John Gore found her going into the little old parlor with an apron full of sticks, but he protested that the kitchen ingle-nook would do for him, and that he liked the smell of dinner. So he sat himself down in the nook under the hood of the great fireplace, stretching his legs out to the fire, and wondering what he would say to Christopher Jennifer’s wife.
There was a pot boiling over the fire, and Mrs. Winnie began to gather her flour and things upon the table for the making of a pudding. She took a great pot of preserves from a cupboard, and set to work very sensibly in her practical, brown-armed way.
“If I had known, sir, I wouldn’t have put an old one in the pot.”
“Old one?”