“Then you’re glad to see me in the Army dress?”
“I’ll be blowed if I are!”
“You said you were, just now.”
“I didn’t mean———”
“What you said? Oh, thank you. I don’t much care for talkin’ with men as keeps all their truth for other men, Steve Derral.”
“Yer don’t know a man what does that.”
Maiden was visibly disappointed.
“I thought you’d have said as Lou does,” she said carelessly.
“He’s pretty sparin’ with it all round.”
“Oh! there you are! You can never leave Lou alone! You daren’t say that in front of him!”
Steve’s great muscles tightened unbidden. He had been in the draughting yards since daybreak; but there was no weariness in him.
“’Twouldn’t be the fust time, anyhow,” he said composedly. “D’yer want me ter tell him agin. Maiden?”
Maiden glanced across at the wheel-rut. Steve was outside size, and a layman would have called him clumsily built. But they that saw him stripped for fight on North-of-Sunday testified to the brawn and muscle that no tallow had overlaid.
“Steve!” it was almost a whisper. “I wonder if you’d do somethin’ I asked you to?”
“Near anythin’ on God’s earth, my girlie.”
