"It was only when he declared his purpose to get married that I
fully understood how, for a hundred futile and inappreciable reasons,
how--shall I say odious?--he was to all the countryside. Every old woman
in the village was up in arms. Smith, coming upon him near the farm,
promised to break his head for him if he found him about again. But he
twisted his little black moustache with such a bellicose air and rolled
such big, black fierce eyes at Smith that this promise came to nothing.
Smith, however, told the girl that she must be mad to take up with a man
who was surely wrong in his head. All the same, when she heard him in
the gloaming whistle from beyond the orchard a couple of bars of a weird
and mournful tune, she would drop whatever she had in her hand--she
would leave Mrs. Smith in the middle of a sentence--and she would run
out to his call. Mrs. Smith called her a shameless hussy. She answered
nothing. She said nothing at all to anybody, and went on her way as if
she had been deaf. She and I alone all in the land, I fancy, could see
his very real beauty. He was very good-looking, and most graceful in
his bearing, with that something wild as of a woodland creature in his
aspect. Her mother moaned over her dismally whenever the girl came to
see her on her day out. The father was surly, but pretended not to know;
and Mrs. Finn once told her plainly that 'this man, my dear, will do you
some harm some day yet.' And so it went on. They could be seen on the
roads, she tramping stolidly in her finery--grey dress, black feather,
stout boots, prominent white cotton gloves that caught your eye a
hundred yards away; and he, his coat slung picturesquely over one
shoulder, pacing by her side, gallant of bearing and casting tender
glances upon the girl with the golden heart. I wonder whether he saw how
plain she was. Perhaps among types so different from what he had ever
seen, he had not the power to judge; or perhaps he was seduced by the
divine quality of her pity.