On the last day of her Elysium the workhouse master and the chaplain had stalked over the farm shooting partridges. In the afternoon she met them and asked for a couple of birds for Weetman’s return on the morrow. The workhouse was not far away, it was on a hill facing west, and at sunset time its windows would often catch the glare so powerfully that the whole building seemed to burn like a box of contained and smokeless fire. Very beautiful it looked to Phemy.
II
The men had come to work punctually and Phemy herself found so much to do that she had no time to give the pony an apple. She cleared the kitchen once and for all of the pails, guns, harness, and implements that so hampered its domestic intention, and there were abundant signs elsewhere of a new impulse at work in the establishment. She did not know at what hour to expect the prisoner so she often went to the garden gate and glanced up the road. The night had been wild with windy rain, but the morn was sparklingly clear though breezy still. Crisp leaves rustled about the road where the polished chestnuts beside the parted husks lay in numbers, mixed with coral buds of the yews. The sycamore leaves were black rags, but the delicate elm foliage fluttered down like yellow stars. There was a brown field neatly adorned with white coned heaps of turnips, behind it a small upland of deeply green lucerne, behind that nothing but blue sky and rolling cloud. The turnips, washed by the rain, were creamy polished globes.
When at last he appeared she scarcely knew him. Glas Weetman was a big, though not fleshy, man of thirty with a large boyish face and a flat bald head. Now he had a thick dark beard. He was hungry, but his first desire was to be shaved. He stood before the kitchen mirror, first clipping the beard away with scissors, and as he lathered the remainder he said:
“Well, it’s a bad state of things this, my sister dead and my mother gone to America. What shall us do?”
He perceived in the glass that she was smiling.
“There’s naught funny in it, my comic gal,” he bawled indignantly, “what are you laughing at?”
“I wer’n’t laughing. It’s your mother that’s dead.”
“My mother that’s dead. I know.”
“And Miss Alice that’s gone to America.”