She understood they were doing grand things, and that the work would last all the winter.
Minta answered hurriedly and with a curious choice of phrases.

"Oh! he didn't have nothing to say against it." Mr.Brown, the steward, seemed satisfied.

All that she said was somehow irrelevant; and, to Marcella's annoyance, plaintive as usual.

Wharton, with the boy inside his arm, turned his head an instant to listen.
Marcella, having thought of repeating, without names, some of Mrs.
Jellison's gossip, then shrank from it.

He had promised her, she thought to herself with a proud delicacy; and she was not going to treat the word of a working man as different from anybody else's.
So she fastened her cloak again, which she had thrown open in the stifling air of the cottage, and turned both to call her companion and give a smile or two to the sick boy.
But, as she did so, she stood amazed at the spectacle of Wharton and the child.