Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The Choice Keturah, leaning towards the open grate of coals in the cheerful kitchen of the Reverend Samson Jones, rubbed up and down, up and down her old shin; so rhythmical was the motion that she might have been sousing or rubbing clothes, except for a polyphonic " Ow! Ow!" to set off the rubbing. Keturah knew better than to quarrel with fate. But when the latch lifted she looked up eagerly, with that instinctive hunger for sympathy upon which most of the satisfaction of joy or the pleasure of pain depends. It was Deb, the widow Morgan's servant, and Keturah groaned afresh with the joyous sense of having from all the world just the audience she would have chosen for her misery. "Ow, ow!" "Well, indeed, what is it? " asked Deb, subduing her voice, but unable to dim the two ripe, red cherries in her old red cheeks, or the snap in her old eyes. " Ow, 't is a pain — ow! a pain in me leg." " Och, well, 't is too bad, but 't is nothin', 'tisnothin' but the effect of old age," said Deb comfortingly, " an' old age is never comin' alone." " Not comin' alone ? " " Nay, nay, no more nor youth comes without love, nor middle age without comfort, nor—" " Tut," interrupted Keturah sharply, " indeed ye are makin' a mistake; the pain has nothin' to do with growin' old. The other leg is quite as old whatever, but that one is well, aye, quite well." After an awkward silence Deb said lightly, " Is it ? well, indeed!" then passed with feminine skill to another subject. " Have ye heard the news about Tudur Williams ? No ? Well, he went quite nasty with Cardo Parry for playin' false with poor little Sally Edwards." " Did he so! Tudur is always fightin', his pale face looks so fierce." " Aye, bleached. 'T is hard rememberin' he an' the schoolmistress are brother and sis...