At last and, it may be supposed, out of her ready pity and desire to help, she contrived as he went by to drop a little packet from her muff. It was a very ancient trick to play, she knew, and merriment was lighting her eyes and twitching the corners of her mouth as she stood there in the snow and watched him pounce on the treasure with such an eagerness of service. She was half-ashamed of herself, but wholly amused until she saw his eyes as he returned the parcel. He looked hungry, and the laughter ebbed from her face as, with a strange mixture of horror and elation, she knew that if he really wanted her he could have her.
His courtship was rapid and their engagement short, but its permanence was threatened, for when she learnt that he was idly living on the small income left him by a father who had refused to give him a trade or a profession, she said she would not marry him until he found one.
"But you can't pick one up by the roadside," he explained with justice.
"But how, oh how, did you ever consent to such wickedness?"
"I'd like to see him now," she answered angrily, but she wasted no energy on regrets. She realized that the acquiring of a profession would entail a loss of time to which neither was willing to submit, and then one night, as she sat over the fire after the old ladies had gone to bed, she remembered an incident which had impressed her girlhood. Driving through a little village once, she had seen, standing back from the road and fronted by a cobbled courtyard, a white-washed inn. There were bay-trees in tubs before the door, and at the side of the house a garden with clipped yews, but, better than all, just beyond the doorway there had stood a man and a woman with a child on her arm. Something in their attitude, something simple and content and elemental, had made the picture unforgettable. Why should not she and Jim have a little inn like that? He had capital, and they both had strength, and theirs should be a model public-house, with good entertainment for man and beast, and a welcome for every traveller. Rutherford met the proposal doubtfully. "Well, I don't know," he said. "I don't know that it's wise." But he went no further, and indeed her enthusiasm must have silenced him. Their inn was to be in some beautiful part of the country where people would like to stay, and it was not to be primarily a place for the sale of liquor, and people should not be encouraged to spend their evenings in hanging over the bar.