All the days were holy days to Potch since Sophie and he had been married. He looked at her as if she were Undine making toast and tea, cooking, washing dishes, or sweeping and tidying up his hut. He followed her every movement with a worshipful, reverent gaze.
Soon after Sophie's return, Potch had gone to live in the hut which he and his father had occupied in the old days. He had put a veranda of boughs to the front of it, and had washed the roof and walls with carbide to lessen the heat in summer. He had turned out the rooms and put up shelves, trying to furnish the place a little for Sophie; but she had not wanted it altered at all. She had cleared the cupboard, put clean paper on the shelves, and had arranged Potch's books on them herself.
Sophie loved the austerity of her home when she went to live in it--its earthen floor, bare walls, unvarnished furniture, the couch under the window, the curtains of unbleached linen she had hemstitched herself, the row of shining syrup-tins in which she kept tea, sugar, and coffee on shelves near the fireplace, the big earthenware jar for flowers, and a couple of jugs which Snow-Shoes had made for her and baked in an oven of his own contrivance. She had a quiet satisfaction in doing all the cleaning up and tidying to keep her house in the order she liked, so that her eyes could rest on any part of it and take pleasure from the sense of beauty in ordinary and commonplace things.
But the hut was small and its arrangements so simple that an hour or two after Potch had gone to the mines Sophie went to the shed into which he had moved her cutting-wheel, and busied herself facing and polishing the stones which some of the men brought her as usual. She knew her work pleased them. She was as skilful at showing a stone to all its advantage as any cutter on the Ridge, and nothing delighted her more than when Watty or George or one of the Crosses exclaimed with satisfaction at a piece of work she had done.
In the afternoon sometimes she went down to the New Town to talk with Maggie Grant, Mrs. Woods, or Martha. She was understudying Martha, too, when anyone was sick in the town, and needed nursing or a helping hand. Martha had her hands full when Mrs. Ted Cross's fourth baby was born. There were five babies in the township at the time, and Sophie went to Crosses' every morning to fix up the house and look after the children and Mrs. Ted before Martha arrived. When Martha found the Crosses' washing gaily flapping on the line one morning towards midday, she protested in her own vigorous fashion.