Cities and towns -- Growth -- Fiction; Wales -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
John Willie would have liked to ask her why she had put on the black
dress and the black shoes, but something seemed to whisper to him not to
do so. No doubt she had caught the trout with her hand, in one of the
pools of a stream that slid and chattered under fern down the side of
Delyn, and he feared that did he approach her too suddenly even by words
she might be off, even as those trout would have vanished in a flash at
the least disturbance of the water by her hand. She had cooked them on
the wood; she had also made a cake of flour and water and no salt; and
she served the fish in a tin platter by the little clearing she had made
for the hearth. He sat now, and she stood; she brought also a mug of
milk, from the surface of which she took a tiny caterpillar with the
tip of a frond; and when he had eaten she cleaned the platter by
scouring it with a handful of fern-rot and then setting it in a little
stream with a stone upon it. Then they stood before one another again,
he with his back to the hut, she in front of him, her head always
superbly erect, but slowly turning from time to time, while her eyes
sought the lake, the line of bracken against the sky where the mountain
dropped, and his own eyes, indifferently.
Then, unexpectedly, she asked a question.
"You come to fis-s?" she asked.
He said that he had thought of it.
"There is wa-ter in the boat, but indeed I not touch it. I go and empty
it," she said.
But he stopped her.--"Oh, it's no good now--too bright," he said. "Might
try in the evening. Sit down, won't you? I want to ask you some
questions."
She curled herself up in the bracken, and he set his back against the
wall of the hut and began to fill his pipe.
But instead of questioning her, John Willie had all the appearances of a
man who was questioning himself. He sat a little behind Ynys, so that
when she looked straight before her he lost her full profile; and he
moved no more than she. He was suddenly thinking how thoroughly sick he
was of Llanyglo.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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