“Has he done it?” asked Emily—“and did you watch him? If I had seen it I should have hated the sight of him, and I’d rather have touched a maggot than him.” “I shouldn’t be particularly pleased if he touched me,” said Lettie. “There is something so loathsome about callousness and brutality,” said Emily. “He fills me with disgust.” “Does he?” said Lettie, smiling coldly. She went across to the old piano. “He’s only healthy. He’s never been sick, not anyway, yet.” She sat down and played at random, letting the numbed notes fall like dead leaves from the haughty, ancient piano. Emily and I talked on by the window, about books and people. She was intensely serious, and generally succeeded in reducing me to the same state. After a while, when the milking and feeding were finished, George came in. Lettie was still playing the piano. He asked her why she didn’t play something with a tune in it, and this caused her to turn round in her chair to give him a withering answer. His appearance, however, scattered her words like startled birds. He had come straight from washing in the scullery, to the parlour, and he stood behind Lettie’s chair unconcernedly wiping the moisture from his arms. His sleeves were rolled up to the shoulder, and his shirt was opened wide at the breast. Lettie was somewhat taken aback by the sight of him standing with legs apart, dressed in dirty leggings and boots, and breeches torn at the knee, naked at the breast and arms. “Why don’t you play something with a tune in it?” he repeated, rubbing the towel over his shoulders beneath the shirt. “A tune!” she echoed, watching the swelling of his arms as he moved them, and the rise and fall of his breasts, wonderfully solid and white. Then having curiously examined the sudden meeting of the sunhot skin with the white flesh in his throat, her eyes met his, and she turned again to the piano, while the colour grew in her ears, mercifully sheltered by a profusion of bright curls. “What shall I play?” she asked, fingering the keys somewhat confusedly. He dragged out a book of songs from a little heap of music, and set it before her. “Which do you want to sing?” she asked thrilling a little as she felt his arms so near her. “Anything you like.” “A love song?” she said. “If you like—yes, a love song——” he laughed with clumsy insinuation that made the girl writhe. She did not answer, but began to play Sullivan’s “Tit Willow.” He had a passable bass voice, not of any great depth, and he sang with gusto. Then she gave him “Drink to me only with thine eyes.” At the end she turned and asked him if he liked the words. He replied that he thought them rather daft. But he looked at her with glowing brown eyes, as if in hesitating challenge.