'Sure now! You don't say so? I wish he would come and repair mine. It's been tumbling down, stone by stone, waiting till Morgan the mason did be coming round.'
'Well, you ask Willem. And if you would be offering to teach him to reckon up with figures, he would be proud and pleased to build it up. 'Deed he would. He do just be asking me to teach him. But you go looking at that wall of his. Willem do want encouraging, not laughing at. He will build up more than a broken-down wall some day.--Shall you be wanting peat or lime next week?'
'Ah, yes; and if you think Willem can mend the wall you can bring a sled of stones as well.'
The next day, on the way from church, Owen Griffith got William by his side, and set him counting the trees by the wayside, and the sheep on the hills, as preliminary to lessons in arithmetic, but nothing said he of any broken walls.
He left that for the afternoon, when he and Cate walked up to the farm, ostensibly to learn what news Ales had brought from Cardiff.
Over all that he shook his head, uncertain what to make of it, though he said, 'It do look bad, it do.'
But there was nothing uncertain in his exclamation of surprise at the firmly repaired walls Mrs. Edwards showed so proudly as the work of her youngest son.
It led to the open proposal that William should restore his fences to condition in return for lessons in arithmetic, and to Mrs. Edwards' consent to that use of his time.
Rhys had strolled away with Cate to talk over the deferred prospect of their marriage, and so did not hear of this arrangement until afterwards, when, for reasons of his own, he thought best to keep the peace.
It was the small beginning of greater things.
Ales had resumed her work on the farm, but not with the spirit and vivacity of old. She had been wont to sing over her work, and had a store of old Welsh ballads in her memory. But the song-bird mourned in silence for the mate torn away so ruthlessly, and, as weeks and months and years rolled on in the same drear monotony of hopelessness, her heart grew colder and heavier, and her prayers became as the very wailings of despair.
It cut her to the soul to hear Rhys grumbling, as he did, at the money filched from them to pay, not only the rent Evan should have paid, but the heavy costs of a seizure in addition; and she more than once resolved to quit the farm when the year expired.