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to her something wonderful, beyond her.
    He came and bowed above her. A warmth radiated through her as if she had drunk wine.
    “Now do come and have this one wi’ me,” he said caressively. “It’s easy, you know. I’m pining to see you dance.”
    She had told him before she could not dance. She glanced at his humility and smiled. Her smile was very beautiful. It moved the man so that he forgot everything.
    “No, I won’t dance,” she said softly. Her words came clean and ringing.
    Not knowing what he was doing—he often did the right thing by instinct—he sat beside her, inclining reverentially.
    “But you mustn’t miss your dance,” she reproved.
    “Nay, I don’t want to dance that—it’s not one as I care about.”
    “Yet you invited me to it.”
    He laughed very heartily at this.
    “I never thought o’ that. Tha’rt not long in taking the curl out of me.” n
    It was her turn to laugh quickly.
    “You don’t look as if you’d come much uncurled,” she said.
    “I’m like a pig’s tail, I curl because I canna help it,” he laughed, rather boisterously.
    “And you are a miner!” she exclaimed in surprise.
    “Yes. I went down when I was ten.”
    She looked at him in wondering dismay.
    “When you were ten! And wasn’t it very hard?” she asked.
    “You soon get used to it. You live like th’ mice, an’ you pop out at night to see what’s going on.”
    “It makes me feel blind,” she frowned.
    “Like a moudiwarp!” he laughed. “Yi, an’ there’s some chaps as does go round like moudiwarps.” o He thrust his face forward in the blind, snout-like way of a mole, seeming to sniff and peer for direction. “They dun though!” he protested naïvely. “Tha niver seed such a way they get in. But tha mun p let me ta’e thee down some time, an’ tha can see for thysen.” q
    She looked at him, startled. This was a new tract of life suddenly opened before her. She realised the life of the miners, hundreds of them toiling below earth and coming up at evening. He seemed to her noble. He risked his life daily, and with gaiety. She looked at him, with a touch of appeal in her pure humility.
    “Shouldn’t ter like it?” he asked tenderly. “’Appen not, it ’ud dirty thee.”
    She had never been “thee‘d” and “thou’d” before. 6
    The next Christmas they were married, and for three months she was perfectly happy: for six months she was very happy.
    He had signed the pledge, r and wore the blue ribbon of a teetotaller : he was nothing if not showy. They lived, she thought, in his own house. It was small, but convenient enough, and quite nicely furnished, with solid, worthy stuff that suited her honest soul. The women, her neighbours, were rather foreign to her, and Morel’s mother and sisters were apt to sneer at her ladylike ways. But she could perfectly well live by herself, so long as she had her husband close.
    Sometimes, when she herself wearied of love-talk, she tried to open her heart seriously to him. She saw him listen deferentially, but without understanding. This killed her efforts at a finer intimacy, and she had flashes of fear. Sometimes he was restless of an evening: it was not enough for him just to be near her, she realised. She was glad when he set himself to little jobs.
    He was a remarkably handy man—could make or mend anything. So she would say:
    “I do like that coal-rake of your mother’s—it is small and natty.”
    “Does ter, my wench? Well, I made that, so I can make thee one!”
    “What! why, it’s a steel one!”
    “An’ what if it is! Tha s‘lt ha’e one very similar, if not exactly same.
    She did not mind the mess, nor the hammering and noise. He was busy and happy.
    But in the seventh month, when she was brushing his Sunday coat, she felt papers in the breast pocket, and, seized with a sudden curiosity, took them out to read. He very rarely wore the frock-coat he was married in: and it had not occurred to her before to feel curious