The youth moved a pace or two nearer, and the scent of his honest heat afflicted Ashurst's nostrils.
“Twon't please yu when I've bashed yure head in!”
“Indeed! When would you like to begin that?”
Joe answered only with the loudness of his breathing, but his eyes looked like those of a young and angry bull. Then a sort of spasm seemed to convulse his face.
A rush of jealousy, of contempt, and anger with this thick, loud-breathing rustic got the better of Ashurst's self-possession; he jumped up, and pushed back his chair.
And as he said those simple words, he saw Megan in the doorway with a tiny brown spaniel puppy in her arms. She came up to him quickly:
Joe turned away; the back of his neck was literally crimson.
Ashurst put his finger to the mouth of the little brown bullfrog of a creature in her arms. How cosy it looked against her!
“It's fond of you already. Ah I Megan, everything is fond of you.”
“Telling me to go away, because you didn't want me here.”
She stamped her foot; then looked up at Ashurst. At that adoring look he felt his nerves quiver, just as if he had seen a moth scorching its wings.
“No.” And smothering her face against the puppy's little fat, brown body, she slipped back into the house.
Ashurst wandered down the lane. At the gate of the wild meadow he came on the lame man and his cows.
“Ah! 'Tes brave weather for the grass. The ashes be later than th' oaks this year. 'When th' oak before th' ash---'”
Ashurst said idly: “Where were you standing when you saw the gipsy bogie, Jim?”
“It might be under that big apple tree, as you might say.”
“I shouldn't like to say rightly that 't was there. 'Twas in my mind as '.was there.”
“They du zay old master, Mist' Narracombe come o' gipsy stock. But that's tellin'. They'm a wonderful people, yu know, for claimin' their own. Maybe they knu 'e was goin', and sent this feller along for company. That's what I've a-thought about it.”
“'E 'ad 'air all over 'is face, an' goin' like this, he was, zame as if 'e 'ad a viddle. They zay there's no such thing as bogies, but I've a-zeen the 'air on this dog standin' up of a dark naight, when I couldn' zee nothin', meself.”
“Yeas, very near full, but 'twas on'y just risen, gold-like be'ind them trees.”