"Ah, shut it up, tha false little bitch!" came the man's angry voice, and the child sobbed louder.
Constance strode nearer, with blazing eyes. The man turned and looked at her, saluting coolly, but he was pale with anger.
"What's the matter? Why is she crying?" demanded Constance, peremptory but a little breathless.
A faint smile like a sneer came on the man's face. "Nay, yo' mun ax 'er," he replied callously, in broad vernacular.
Connie felt as if he had hit her in the face, and she changed colour. Then she gathered her defiance, and looked at him, her dark blue eyes blazing rather vaguely.
"I asked you," she panted.
He gave a queer little bow, lifting his hat. "You did, your Ladyship," he said; then, with a return to the vernacular: "but I canna tell yer." And he became a soldier, inscrutable, only pale with annoyance.
Connie turned to the child, a ruddy, black-haired thing of nine or ten. "What is it, dear? Tell me why you're crying!" she said, with the conventionalised sweetness suitable. More violent sobs, self-conscious. Still more sweetness on Connie's part.
"There, there, don't you cry! Tell me what they've done to you!" . . . and intense tenderness of tone. At the same time she felt in the pocket of her knitted jacket, and luckily found a sixpence.
"Don't you cry then!" she said, bending in front of the child. "See what I've got for you!"
Sobs, snuffles, a fist taken from a blubbered face, and a black shrewd eye cast for a second on the sixpence. Then more sobs, but subduing. "There, tell me what's the matter, tell me!" said Connie, putting the coin into the child's chubby hand, which closed over it.
"It's the. . . it's the. . . pussy!"
Shudders of subsiding sobs.
"What pussy, dear?"
After a silence the shy fist, clenching on sixpence, pointed into the bramble brake.
"There!"
Connie looked, and there, sure enough, was a big black cat, stretched out grimly, with a bit of blood on it.
"Oh!" she said in repulsion.
