'"Tom," said the old gentleman, "the widow's a fine woman-- remarkably fine woman--eh, Tom?" Here the old fellow screwed up his eyes, cocked up one of his wasted little legs, and looked altogether so unpleasantly amorous, that Tom was quite disgusted with the levity of his behaviour--at his time of life, too!
The moment he married the widow, he would sell off all the furniture, and run away.
She worked me middling hard for about an hour, and then the widow made her ease up.
I set down again, a-shaking all over, and got out my pipe for a smoke; for the house was all as still as death now, and so the widow wouldn't know.
Heaven help ye, good Master Robin, to answer a poor widow's prayers!"
Then Robin Hood sped straightway to the forest-camp, where he heard the details of the skirmish--how that his men had been out-numbered five to one, but got off safely, as they thought, until a count of their members had shown the loss of the widow's three sons.
"My young friends here have their nerves a little shaken," said the widow, with a smile, to the clergyman at the altar.
The widow's glance was observed to wander, for an instant, towards a window of the church, as if searching for the time-worn marble that she had dedicated to her first husband; then her eyelids dropped over their faded orbs, and her thoughts were drawn irresistibly to another grave.
He was aware that the world would regard such a sentiment as preposterous, especially in relation to a woman of one-and-twenty; the practice of "the world" being to treat of a young
widow's second marriage as certain and probably near, and to smile with meaning if the
widow acts accordingly.
'No,' returned the
widow. 'It was in the street, I think.
The Welshman admitted several ladies and gentlemen, among them the
Widow Douglas, and noticed that groups of citizens were climbing up the hill -- to stare at the stile.
The twins took a position near the door, the
widow stood at Luigi's side, Rowena stood beside Angelo, and the march-past and the introductions began.
