“Oh dear, those boys! They are never in the way when they are wanted.”
The speaker came forward and showed herself. She was a woman of some forty years or more, looking older than she was, and evidently very weary. She wore a plain untrimmed skirt of dark woollen stuff, short to the ankles, a long linen apron, and a blue hood over her head and shoulders. Resting her worn hands on the half-door, she looked drearily up and down the street, as if in languid hope of catching a glimpse of the boys who should have been there, and were not.
“Well, there’s no help for it!” she said at last, “Flemild, child, you must go for the water to-night.”
“I? O Mother!” The girl’s tone was one of manifest reluctance.
“It can’t be helped, child. Take Derette with you, and be back as quick as you can, before the dusk comes on. The lads should have been here to spare you, but they only think of their own pleasure. I don’t know what the world’s coming to, for my part.”
“Father Dolfin says it’s going to be burnt up,” said a third voice—that of a child—from the interior of the house.
“Time it was!” replied the mother bluntly. “There’s nought but trouble and sorrow in it—leastwise I’ve never seen much else. It’s just work, work, work, from morning to night, and often no rest to speak of from night to morning. You get up tireder than you went to bed, and you may just hold your tongue for all that any body cares, as the saints know. Well, well!—Come, make haste, child, or there’ll be a crowd round Saint Martin’s Well.” (Note 1.)
“O Mother! mayn’t I go to Plato’s Well?”
“What, and carry your budget four times as far? Nonsense, Flemild!”
“But, Mother, please hear me a minute! It’s a quiet enough way, when you are once past the Bayly, and I can step into the lodge and see if Cousin Stephen be at home. If he be, he’ll go with me, I know.”