Page 164 - lady-chatterlys-lover

’The hut’s not very tidy, if you don’t mind,’ he said. ‘I
cleared it what I could.’
’But I didn’t want you to trouble!’ she said.
’Oh, it wasn’t any trouble. I am setting the hens in about
a week. But they won’t be scared of you. I s’ll have to see to
them morning and night, but I shan’t bother you any more
than I can help.’
’But you wouldn’t bother me,’ she pleaded. ‘I’d rather not
go to the hut at all, if I am going to be in the way.’
He looked at her with his keen blue eyes. He seemed
kindly, but distant. But at least he was sane, and wholesome,
if even he looked thin and ill. A cough troubled him.
’You have a cough,’ she said.
’Nothing—a cold! The last pneumonia left me with a
cough, but it’s nothing.’
He kept distant from her, and would not come any near-
er.
She went fairly often to the hut, in the morning or in the
afternoon, but he was never there. No doubt he avoided her
on purpose. He wanted to keep his own privacy.
He had made the hut tidy, put the little table and chair
near the fireplace, left a little pile of kindling and small logs,
and put the tools and traps away as far as possible, effacing
himself. Outside, by the clearing, he had built a low little
roof of boughs and straw, a shelter for the birds, and under
it stood the live coops. And, one day when she came, she
found two brown hens sitting alert and fierce in the coops,
sitting on pheasants’ eggs, and fluffed out so proud and
deep in all the heat of the pondering female blood. This al-

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