Summer Will Show Read Online Free PDF Page A

I don’t quite like the man. He’s so queer.”
    “But he’s the kilnman. His work makes him look like that.”
    Her face working in an attempt to find words, the child whispered,
    “It’s not him that I mind. But there’s something about him so very auspicious.”
    At the second hoisting she made no resistance; and whether the man had overheard her or no, he knew his place well enough to show no consciousness of her words. Standing priest-like and impassive upon the steps, his head and shoulders dark against the background of trembling air, he stretched out his arms for the light burden, and Augusta was held above the opening of the kiln.
    Her face, lit by the flickering fires below, wore the same bewildered and cogitative expression, and her eyes did not open for a single glance of curiosity for what was beneath.
    “Why didn’t you look?” enquired Damian. “Were you afraid?”
    “I forgot.”
    “Miss Augusta kept her eyes shut as she was told,” improved the overhearing Hannah. “Miss Augusta behaved properly, and God will cure her cough because she was obedient.”
    Lost in her musing dream, the child stood pale and unhearing.
    The man having been given the shilling for his pains, and dismissed from their world, the little party moved away, slowly and religiously as they approached. No one spoke. Sophia was the first to rouse herself. The fumes must have made us sleepy, she thought, suddenly conscious that there was something odd, something pompous and bewitched about the way they were all behaving. And she began to walk faster, and to sweep her glance this way and that over the wide view from the terrace of the hill.
    At the entrance of the lane she looked back. The man was standing where they had left him, staring after them. Hannah looked back too.
    “How he stares, madam! But no wonder. He might be here year in, year out, and scarcely be visited by a soul, let alone little gentry children. He’ll think of this till suppertime, I dare say.”
    Sophia nodded her assent. Even as she did so, her mind glancing casually at the lot of the lime-kiln man, she received a sudden and violent impression that, however fixedly he had stared after them, and stared still, he did not really see them, and that their coming was already wiped from his mind like a dream ... .A fancy, and she disliked fancies ... .But even before she had time to rebuke it Damian coughed, and her thoughts were tilted back again to what was actual.
    What childishness to have expected that the children would be cured of their coughs immediately. She was no wiser than a poor papist, that would hope to nail up a waxen leg or a goitre before a shrine, like dead vermin nailed up on a gamekeeper’s tree. Walking ahead, listening for coughs, she began to reason herself into common sense, damping down her present fears by a reckoning of what illnesses the children had already been through, what remained for them yet to combat. It should be comforting to know how greatly the former outnumbered the latter. Damian aged nine, Augusta aged seven, might be looked upon as scarred and salted veterans in these wars of youth. It is best to get such things over early in life, every one was agreed as to that. Later on they might affect the constitution, and certainly interfered with schooling. So she might count herself lucky among mothers.
    “Excuse me, madam, but the children are rather tired. I think it would be best for them to sit in the shade for a while.”
    The sycamore by the gate between the two fields made a small separate world of shade in the glaring whitish landscape. In its shelter the two children stood islanded, looking out on the brightness all round as though they were looking from a fortress on some beleaguering danger. They had drawn close together, and stood in silence, their bright eyes flickering in their pale faces, their bony knees seeming years older than their thin legs. Augusta loosened her straw bonnet; as it fell back it showed