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get him up and take him out for an hour or so, returning to nursery tea, followed by a game, bathtime and bed. Between six and seven she returned to her own cottage and spent most of the evening alone while her father drank gloomily in the pub next door.
    Molly had been quite content with this placid life, despite the constant grumblings of the old man. Luckily, he was out of the house for a large part of the day, pottering about the church and churchyard, occasionally digging a grave and tidying it after the sad ceremony or ringing a wedding peal and sweeping up the confetti and gay little silver horseshoes afterward. His demeanor remained exactly the same whatever the function. He hauled on his striped furry sally as each young couple emerged, starry-eyed, into the dazzling sunshine of Thrush Green, with the same gloomy expression of a disgruntled tortoise with which he wielded his mattock to lift the first sod for some boyhood friend's grave. Life was sour for old Mr. Piggott, and he made sure that everybody knew it.
    The afternoon was the happiest part of Molly's day. She did her ironing or mending in the quiet stone-flagged kitchen whose windows looked out upon the garden in which old Mr. Bassett had pottered and finally died. She loved this tranquil hour in the hushed early afternoon. Thrush Green was somnolent in its after-dinner nap, and the old house dozed around her. Paul was in his bed upstairs playing, looking at his books, or sometimes merely lying there in that blissful state between sleeping and waking, where dreams and reality merge imperceptibly and the cry of the cuckoo from the lime tree might well be the chime of the clock on the wall of the dream room into which one has just floated.
    Molly's kitchen was fragrant with the smell of freshly ironed linen and she felt her satisfaction mounting with the pile. Paul's small shirts and vests, his minute trousers and his handkerchiefs, bright with nursery rhymes, all received special care. And later, as she sat in the low wooden armchair, with the needle flashing in and out of the clean clothes, she would plan the walk that she would take him on when the time came to lift young Paul, warm and heavy, smelling faintly of Vinolia soap, from his rest.
    In the winter they kept to the roads, or, if the earth were hard with frost, they might play on Thrush Green with a bat and ball in view of Paul's home. Occasionally they walked down the steep hill to Lulling to shop for something which Joan had forgotten. But more often they took the little leafy lane which led from Thrush Green to Upper Pleshy, Nod and Nidden, the lane that threaded half a dozen or more sleepy thatched villages, like hoary old beads upon its winding string, before it emerged upon the broad highway which led to Stratford-upon-Avon.
    Sometimes their expeditions were more adventurous. Molly and Paul knew all the true joys that were within an hour's walk of Thrush Green. There was the pond that lay, dark and mysterious, along the lower road to Lulling Woods, mirroring the trees that stood around it. Sometimes in the summer Paul had taken a bright wooden boat on a string and floated it there, beating at the water's edge with a fan of leaves to make waves. In the spring vast masses of frogs' spawn floated just beneath the surface, like submerged chain mail cast there by some passing knight. And on one day of hard frost Paul and Molly had slid back and forth across the shining ice, screaming with delight, watched by a bold robin who sat fearlessly nearby on a low bare branch preening the pale-gray feathers that edged the bronze of his breast.
    There were other places that they loved which were accessible only in the summer. There was the steep path through Lulling Woods, cool as a cathedral, even on the sultriest day. There was the field path to Nod, where the grass brushed Paul's shoulder in high summer and he looked at marguerites and red sorrel at eye level. A bower of briar roses guarded the final stile