Page:Gaskell - North and South, vol. I, 1855.djvu/149

 Margaret turned round to walk alongside of the girl in her feeble progress homeward. But for a minute or two she did not speak. At last she said in a low voice,

"Bessy, do wish to die?" For she shrank from death herself, with all the clinging to life so natural to the young and healthy.

Bessy was silent in her turn for a minute or two. Then she replied,

"If yo'd led the life I have, and getten as weary of it as I have, and thought at times, 'maybe it'll last for fifty or sixty years—it does wi' some,'—and got dizzy and dazed, and sick, as each of them sixty years seemed to spin about me, and mock me with its length of hours and minutes, and endless bits o'time—oh, wench! I tell thee thou'd been glad enough when th' doctor said he feared thou'd never see another winter."

"Why, Bessy, what kind of a life has yours been?"

"Nought worse than many others', I reckon. Only I fretted again it, and they didn't."

"But what was it? You know, I'm a stranger here, so perhaps I'm not so quick at understanding what you mean as if I'd lived all my life at Milton."

"If yo'd ha' come to our house when yo' said yo' would, I could maybe ha' told you. But father says yo're just like th' rest on 'em; its out o' sight out o' mind wi' you."

"I don't know who the rest are; and I've been very busy; and, to tell the truth, I had forgotten my promise—"

"Yo' offered it; we asked none of it."