Maggie came, the hair as usual flying all around her sunny face. She was accompanied by the young man they called Oliver, who carried a stable-fork and had evidently just come from the farmyard. Maggie was looking unusually serious, Frances discovered, as the three of them paused at a corner of the old house for discussion.
Presently Maggie’s clear tones reached her. “Don’t you be a silly girl, Dolly! You’ve no right to risk it. You keep her where she is!”
Dolly for once seemed undecided, and Oliver, with a faintly rueful smile on his comical countenance, ranged himself on Maggie’s side.
“Don’t let’s have a shindy for goodness’ sake!” he said. “We’ve kept him quiet till now, but I won’t answer for him much longer. The beast has got to break out some time. I told Arthur so this morning.”
“Oh, but this is nonsense!” declared Dolly. “You can keep him in the farmyard surely. I know I could.”
“Well, you’d better go and do it then, that’s all,” said Maggie. “For he’s on the ramp this morning, and no mistake. I can’t pacify him.”
There followed some words in a lower tone which did not reach Frances at her window, and then the group dispersed, Maggie and Oliver departing in the direction of the farmyard, and Dolly entering the house.
Frances was left alone for some time, and presently coming to the not unwelcome conclusion that she was to remain in her room that day, she began to fall asleep. The day was sultry and very still. She heard vaguely the summer sounds that came through her window. The atmosphere was peaceful beyond words. The occasional lowing of a cow in the meadow beyond the garden where the chattering stream ran, the cooing of the pigeons on the roof of the old barn, and the cry of the wheeling swallows that nestled in the eaves, the singing of a thousand larks above the heather-covered moors, all came to her like a softly-coloured dream. She felt wonderfully soothed and at rest, too tired to speculate as to the meaning of that half-heard discussion below her window, content to drowse the time away as long as Nurse Dolly would permit.
The breeze, laden with the scent of heather, came in upon her like a benediction, playing lightly with her hair, closing her weary lids. She sank more and more deeply into repose.
Then, just when the spell seemed complete, there came a sudden and violent interruption, so startling that she sprang up in a wild alarm, not knowing whence it came.