"Yes," said Connie. "Won't you, Hilda?"
Hilda looked up at him.
"Why do you speak Yorkshire?" she said softly.
"That! That's non Yorkshire, that's Derby."
He looked back at her with that faint, distant grin.
"Derby, then! Why do you speak Derby? You spoke natural English at first."
"Did Ah though? An' canna Ah change if Ah'n a mind to 't? Nay nay, let me talk Derby if it suits me. If yo'n nowt against it."
"It sounds a little affected," said Hilda.
"Ay, 'appen so! An' up i' Tevershall yo'd sound affected." He looked again at her, with a queer calculating distance, along his cheek-bones: as if to say: Yi, an'who are you?
He tramped away to the pantry for the food.
The sisters sat in silence. He brought another plate, and knife and fork. Then he said:
"An' if it's the same to you, I s'll ta'e my coat off, like I allers do,"
And he took off his coat, and hung it on the peg, then sat down to table in his shirtsleeves: a shirt of thin, cream-coloured flannel.
"'Elp yerselves!" he said. "'Elp yerselves! Dunna wait f'r axin!"
He cut the bread, then sat motionless. Hilda felt, as Connie once used to, his power of silence and distance. She saw his smallish, sensitive, loose hand on the table. He was no simple working man, not he: he was acting! acting!
"Still!" she said, as she took a little cheese. "It would be more natural if you spoke to us in normal English, not in vernacular."
He looked at her, feeling her devil of a will.
"Would it?" he said in the normal English. "Would it? Would anything that was said between you and me be quite natural, unless you said you wished me to hell before your sister ever saw me again: and unless I said something almost as unpleasant back again? Would anything else be natural?"
"Oh yes!" said Hilda. "Just good manners would be quite natural."
"Second nature, so to speak!" he said: then he began to laugh. "Nay," he said. "I'm weary o' manners. Let me be!"
Hilda was frankly baffled and furiously annoyed. After all, he might show that he realized he was being honoured. Instead of
