"I've always heard it spoken that the women do dearly love something or other at such times. Mother used to tell how before I were born, she were in a terrible hurry to eat a Cornish Gillyflower. But there wasn't one tree as bore an apple that year. Irish Peaches? Ess, bushels. No, that wouldn't do for her. Tom Putts? Sweet Larks? Ess, bushels. No more wouldn't they serve. Boxers? Sops and Wines? Ess, bushels, and, darn 'ee, they made her retch to look at 'em." "She'd properly got the pip, hadn't she?" observed Jenny mockingly. Trewhella saw the wire and made a circuit. "So I was thinking you might be wanting something as I could get for 'ee on market-day to Camston." "No, thanks, there's nothing I want. Not even a penny pomegranate," said Jenny, who was anxious for Zachary to go. She did not like this attempt at intimacy. She had not foreseen the alliance of sympathy he presumably wished to form on account of her child. The more she considered his claim, the more irrational and impertinent did it seem that he should dare assume any share in the unborn miracle worked by Jenny Pearl. Trewhella pulled himself together, still progressing slowly, even painfully, but braced to snap if necessary every strand of barbed wire still between him and his object. "What I were going to say to 'ee was, now that there's this lill baby, I'd like for 'ee both to go chapel. I've said nothing so far about your not going; but I daren't run up against the dear Lord's wrath in the matter of my baby." "Don't be silly," said Jenny. "How can anything happen to _my_ baby without its happening to me?" "Well, I'd like for 'ee to come," Trewhella persisted. Here was Jenny in a quandary. If she refused, according to her fiery first impulse, what religious pesterings would follow her round the garden. How he would drawl in that unnatural manner of speech a lot of rubbish which had nothing to do with her. He might even take to preaching in bed. He had once frightened her by demanding in a sepulchral speculation whether she had ever reflected that the flames of hell were so hot that there a white-hot poker would be cool as ice-cream. If on the other hand she submitted to a few hours' boredom, what an amount of treasured liberty would be sacrificed and what more intrusive attempts might not be made upon the inviolable egoism. "But I don't like church and chapel," said Jenny. "It doesn't interest me." Then she saw her husband gathering his eloquence for wearisome argument and decided to compromise--and for Jenny to compromise meant character in the melting-pot. "I might come once and again," she said. Trewhella seemed relieved and, after a moment's awkwardness in which he gave her the idea that he was on the verge of thanks, departed to his business.