Miss Clare Remembers and Emily Davis Read Online Free PDF

well as Ids own, handing over the money to Francis and waving his thanks aside. Francis and Mary never forgot their debt to his parents, and the two couples were more closely knit by this misfortune than ever before.
    The kindly farmer and his wife, from whose house Mary had been married, heard of her plight and sent a bundle of mending for Mary to do weekly, and paid her for it very generously. The carrier's cart brought the mending, and a big basket of vegetables, eggs and butter as well, and such kindnesses warmed their sad hearts during that cold winter.
    Sometimes, in his blackest moods of inaction, Francis would brood on the unjust state of affairs which cast a man still further into despair when he needed help most. He was grateful to his father, to his friends and neighbours, but he did not want charity. Somehow or other he ought to be able to ensure that a certain amount of money came into his home to keep his wife and babies while he was off work. People talked about it, he knew. It was to be a long time before such theories were put into practice, and meanwhile Francis and his wife had to endure hard times.

    In later years Dolly Clare was to hear her parents talk of that black winter, the first of her life, as the time when they had been driven to the verge of despair.
    But time passed, the spring came, and Francis limped about again, burning to get back to work. Mary's spirits rose, Ada played once more in the little garden, and the baby lay there too in its wicker bassinet, gazing at this bright new world and finding it good.

CHAPTER 4
    T HE baby's first birthday was celebrated by a family picnic in the woods which bordered an expanse of common land north of Caxley.
    After the bitter winter, spring was doubly welcome. It was unusually warm. Primroses and anemones starred the leafy mould underfoot, and early bluebells, still knotted in bud, were already to be seen. Mary and Francis breathed in the woodland scents hungrily as they rested on a mossy bank with their backs against the rough comfort of a beech tree.
    The battered baby carriage was drawn up nearby, its occupant deep in sleep. But Ada, rosy and sturdy, scrambled joyfully over tree roots, plucking the heads from flowers and gathering twigs, feathers, acorn cups, pebbles and any other fascinating object which caught her excited eye.
    'Wouldn't it be lovely,' said Mary dreamily, observing the child's happiness, 'to have a little house of our own in this wood. Or better still, just on the edge of it, on the common.'

    Francis smiled at her fancies.
    'We'd soon be hustled off, I knows,' he told her. 'No better'n gipsies, we'd be thought. But you take heart, my dear, one of these fine days you shall have a little house away from Caxley and the throng.'
    With the sun above him, the warm air lifting his bright hair, and his family closely about him, Francis felt his strength renewed. He had been back at work for some weeks, and although his injured leg was still weak he found that he could get through a day's work steadily. Although money was scarce, to be busy again raised the young man's spirits. In a month's time, he told himself, his leg would be as good as new. In fact, it was never to be quite as strong as its fellow, and Francis walked with a slight limp for the rest of his life.
    Mary stirred from her day-dreaming and began to unpack the food from the basket. Ada, breathless with her exertions, came up to this interesting object, and flung herself down beside her mother.
    'I wonder where we'll all be this time next year,' said Mary, holding a loaf to her chest and looking across its crusty top to the distant common. 'D'you reckon we'll have that little house by the time our Dolly's two years old?'
    'That we will!' promised her husband stoutly. 'Just you wait and see!'
    But Mary was to wait for another five years before hope of a country cottage came her way, and little Dolly was to celebrate several birthdays at Caxley before making her home in the