She looked at him in wondering dismay.
"When you were ten! And wasn't it very hard?" she asked.
"You soon get used to it. You live like th' mice, an' you pop out at
night to see what's going on."
"It makes me feel blind," she frowned.
"Like a moudiwarp!" he laughed. "Yi, an' there's some chaps as does
go round like moudiwarps." He thrust his face forward in the blind,
snout-like way of a mole, seeming to sniff and peer for direction. "They
dun though!" he protested naively. "Tha niver seed such a way they get
in. But tha mun let me ta'e thee down some time, an' tha can see for
thysen."
She looked at him, startled. This was a new tract of life suddenly
opened before her. She realised the life of the miners, hundreds of them
toiling below earth and coming up at evening. He seemed to her noble. He
risked his life daily, and with gaiety. She looked at him, with a touch
of appeal in her pure humility.
"Shouldn't ter like it?" he asked tenderly. "'Appen not, it 'ud dirty
thee."
She had never been "thee'd" and "thou'd" before.
The next Christmas they were married, and for three months she was
perfectly happy: for six months she was very happy.
He had signed the pledge, and wore the blue ribbon of a tee-totaller: he
was nothing if not showy. They lived, she thought, in his own house.
It was small, but convenient enough, and quite nicely furnished,
with solid, worthy stuff that suited her honest soul. The women, her
neighbours, were rather foreign to her, and Morel's mother and sisters
were apt to sneer at her ladylike ways. But she could perfectly well
live by herself, so long as she had her husband close.
Sometimes, when she herself wearied of love-talk, she tried to open her
heart seriously to him. She saw him listen deferentially, but without
understanding. This killed her efforts at a finer intimacy, and she had
flashes of fear. Sometimes he was restless of an evening: it was not
enough for him just to be near her, she realised. She was glad when he
set himself to little jobs.
He was a remarkably handy man--could make or mend anything. So she would
say:
"I do like that coal-rake of your mother's--it is small and natty."
"Does ter, my wench? Well, I made that, so I can make thee one!"
"What! why, it's a steel one!"
"An' what if it is! Tha s'lt ha'e one very similar, if not exactly
same."
She did not mind the mess, nor the hammering and noise. He was busy and
happy.
But in the seventh month, when she was brushing his Sunday coat, she
felt papers in the breast pocket, and, seized with a sudden curiosity,
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