After a few moments, the youth entered.
"Are you stopping?" he asked in his hard, harsh voice.
He seemed like a blade of destruction standing there. She
quivered to tears.
"Sit you down," said Tom Brangwen, "an' take a bit off your
length."
Will Brangwen sat down. He felt something strange in the
atmosphere. He was dark browed, but his eyes had the keen,
intent, sharp look, as if he could only see in the distance;
which was a beauty in him, and which made Anna so angry.
"Why does he always deny me?" she said to herself. "Why is it
nothing to him, what I am?"
And Tom Brangwen, blue-eyed and warm, sat in opposition to
the youth.
"How long are you stopping?" the young husband asked his
wife.
"Not very long," she said.
"Get your tea, lad," said Tom Brangwen. "Are you itchin' to
be off the moment you enter?"
They talked of trivial things. Through the open door the
level rays of sunset poured in, shining on the floor. A grey hen
appeared stepping swiftly in the doorway, pecking, and the light
through her comb and her wattles made an oriflamme tossed here
and there, as she went, her grey body was like a ghost.
Anna, watching, threw scraps of bread, and she felt the child
flame within her. She seemed to remember again forgotten,
burning, far-off things.
"Where was I born, mother?" she asked.
"In London."
"And was my father"--she spoke of him as if he were
merely a strange name: she could never connect herself with
him--"was he dark?"
"He had dark-brown hair and dark eyes and a fresh colouring.
He went bald, rather bald, when he was quite young," replied her
mother, also as if telling a tale which was just old
imagination.
"Was he good-looking?"
"Yes--he was very good-looking--rather small. I
have never seen an Englishman who looked like him."
"Why?"
"He was"--the mother made a quick, running movement with
her hands--"his figure was alive and changing--it was
never fixed. He was not in the least steady--like a running
stream."
It flashed over the youth--Anna too was like a running
stream. Instantly he was in love with her again.
Tom Brangwen was frightened. His heart always filled with
fear, fear of the unknown, when he heard his women speak of
their bygone men as of strangers they had known in passing and
had taken leave of again.
In the room, there came a silence and a singleness over all
their hearts. They were separate people with separate destinies.
Why should they seek each to lay violent hands of claim on the
other?
The young people went home as a sharp little moon was setting
in the dusk of spring. Tufts of trees hovered in the upper air,
the little church pricked up shadowily at the top of the hill,
the earth was a dark blue shadow.