David stretched his long legs in the grass and looked fixedly down into the water.
“I was nearly ready to go two years ago,” he explained, “but I left school instead and began to work, since I was too young to go to war. I have no father and things were not going very well with my mother and me while the war lasted, and besides every pair of hands was needed for the extra labor. Now that peace has come, our affairs are better again and I could go to college next autumn, except that there are some things I still have to learn. I took this place with my uncle because I knew the work would only last through the summer and then would leave me free. I have a cousin who is a professor over at the college and who helps me with my work, but I don’t have time to go to him often.”
Elizabeth was thinking, as she sat looking into the water, of how she would feel if further education became suddenly as complicated for her as it was for him. The knowledge of his difficulties tended to arouse her own flagging zeal, so that she began to feel that obstinate pyramids and elusive pirates could not really stand in the way of true determination. As she sat reflecting, footsteps approached along the grassy path and Miss Miranda’s voice sounded behind them.
“I have been looking for you everywhere,” she said. “Dick has been trying to tell me about his adventures, but has only succeeded in convincing me that it was a very desperate affair. Poor battered bird, he will not sit on the wall and call out challenges to other crows soon again. I have invited myself to have supper with you here beside the pool, while you tell me all that has happened.”
She set down the basket that she had been carrying and began to spread a table cloth on the grass.
“Michael is feeding Dobbin,” she said, “and I have telephoned to Betsey’s house, so that all that you have to do is to sit down and eat.”
The suggestion was adopted with alacrity, for the appetites of the two were keen, and their own evening meals seemed far away. Amid much mirth was told the tale of poor Dick’s misfortunes, of his headlong flight from his enemies and of the amazement of the pigeons on whose hospitality he had so unceremoniously thrust himself. Of her talk with the farmer’s wife, Betsey did not say so much, only delivered her messages and accounted for the eggs.
“I thought I would drop them a hundred times,” she said at the end. “I never knew that eggs could grow so heavy.”
She sat lazily on the grass, feeling rested and content, unmindful for any further exertion than to dabble her fingers in the quiet pool. A shimmering band of sunset light dyed the opposite half of the basin as though the water had been set on fire. Miss Miranda, leaning comfortably against a tree, had taken out her knitting.
“There is something wrong with Michael to-night,” she observed as she clicked the needles in and out. “He is sitting on the bench by the gate staring straight before him and not even smoking his pipe. When I asked him what was the matter he only growled out that a black cat ran across his path last night and that trouble was bound to follow. I suppose he is reciting spells to himself, to drive off the evil. Certainly there was no use in talking to him.”