"Of course, after that no power on earth could prevent them from getting married.
"Her infatuation endured. People saw her go-ing out to meet him in the evening. She stared with unblinking, fascinated eyes up the road where he was expected to appear, walking freely, with a swing from the hip, and humming one of the love-tunes of his country. When the boy was born, he got elevated at the 'Coach and Horses,' essayed again a song and a dance, and was again ejected.
People expressed their commiseration for a woman married to that Jack-in-the-box. He didn't care.
There was a man now (he told me boastfully) to whom he could sing and talk in the language of his country, and show how to dance by-and-by.
"But I don't know. To me he appeared to have grown less springy of step, heavier in body, less keen of eye. Imagination, no doubt; but it seems to me now as if the net of fate had been drawn closer round him already.
"One day I met him on the footpath over the Talfourd Hill. He told me that 'women were fun-ny.' I had heard already of domestic differences.
People were saying that Amy Foster was begin-ning to find out what sort of man she had married.
He looked upon the sea with indifferent, unseeing eyes. His wife had snatched the child out of his arms one day as he sat on the doorstep crooning to it a song such as the mothers sing to babies in his mountains. She seemed to think he was doing it some harm. Women are funny. And she had ob-jected to him praying aloud in the evening. Why?
He expected the boy to repeat the prayer aloud after him by-and-by, as he used to do after his old father when he was a child--in his own country.