Mary expressed her pleasure but then declared she could not leave the boy alone in his bed.
“He’ll not hurt, Mary, he has no fear in him. Give him the birthday gift before we go. Whisht, he’s coming!”
The child, now clean and handsome, came to his chair and looked up at his father sitting opposite to him.
“Holy Mother!” exclaimed the admiring parent, “it’s the neck of a swan he has. Faylix Tincler, may ye live to be the father of a bishop!”
After tea his father took him up on the down for an hour. As they left their doorway a group of the tidy but wretched orphans was marching back into their seminary, little girls moving in double columns behind a stiff-faced woman. They were all dressed alike in garments of charity exact as pilchards. Grey capes, worsted stockings, straw hats with blue bands round them, and hard boots. The boys were coming in from a different direction, but all of them, even the minutest, were clad in corduroy trousers and short jackets high throated like a gaoler’s. This identity of garment was contrary to the will of God for he had certainly made their pinched bodies diverse enough. Some were short, some tall, dark, fair, some ugly, others handsome. The sight of them made Felix unhappy, he shrank into himself, until he and his father had slipped through a gap in a hedge and were going up the hill that stretched smoothly and easily almost from their very door. The top of the down here was quiet and lovely, but a great flank of it two miles away was scattered over with tiny white figures playing very deliberately at cricket. Pleasant it was up there in the calm evening, and still bright, but the intervening valley was full of grey ungracious houses, allotments, railway arches, churches, graveyards, and schools. Worst of all was the dull forbidding aspect of the Orphanage down beyond the roof of their own house.
They played with a ball and had some wrestling matches until the declining day began to grow dim even on the hill and the fat jumbo clouds over the town were turning pink. If those elephants fell on him—what would they do? Why, they’d mix him up like ice-cream! So said his father.
“Do things ever fall out of the sky?”
“Rain,” said Mr. Tincler.
“Yes, I know.”
“Stars—maybe.”