She lifted a pair of splendid eyes upon him, insolently, but the words upon her lips were swamped in a smile, for he had stooped to pick up a crying child, and the little one had stopped its whimper at his tender words, and was gazing up at him confidingly. "It ain't often she takes to strangers," said the young mother. "She's proud and masterful—and a good job too. She ain't got no father to fight for her, and she may well learn not to trust the men-folk."
I don't know what father said, I didn't listen. Mother was talking to the squire in a far corner of the field, and, though I was shy of seeing the squire, I wanted to know what he was saying to mother. But it seemed only to be commonplace talk.
Mother took me to task for my disordered appearance, and asked me what I had been doing to get the mare in such a state, and Harrod came up and gave some kind of explanation for me, and then the squire, shaking hands with me, asked me what I thought of the weather.
He was self-possessed. It was I who was shy and who could find no words.
"I'm afraid we shall have a pocketful of wind," said he, looking up anxiously at the sky.
It was a gorgeous sunset. Banks upon banks and piles upon piles of cloud, fortifying the horizon, and flung wildly across the heavens till, overhead, they were airy puffs upon the blue vault; seas and billows and cataracts of cloud, all of them suffused with rosy remembrance of the fiery furnace on the ridge of the purple downs—a gorgeous sunset; but the squire was right—a stormy one.
"'Tis the Lord sends mists and 'eat, rain and gales, and we've got to submit, whether or no," murmured Reuben behind my back.
"I've thought of late Mr. Harrod seemed anxious about the crop," said mother, "but it's my belief it's above the common."
I looked quickly round for Harrod, afraid lest he should have heard the remark. I need not have feared: he stood beside my sister, with a strange, dreamy look upon his face which I had never seen there before. There was nothing in their standing together side by side, but there was something in the way they thus stood, an indefinable sense of a companionship in suffering which hardened me to stone.