“Isabelle!”
Startled by the sharpness of pain which the tone evinced, Belle looked swiftly into her mother’s eyes, and read there that the matter was not a theme for jest.
“Poor little woman!” thought the girl, as she cleared away the lunch things; “how it does hurt her when she discovers that we are coarse barnyard fowls, after all! Poor little woman! She’d die for any of us, if it were necessary, but we just make her heart ache with ‘cussedness’! H’m-m! I begin to think the Beckwiths are not that brilliant collection of perfections Bonny claimed! Bob spoiled the morning, and now Roland has finished the afternoon! Though I must admit I began the list of sorrows by behaving like a selfish, silly thing, crying over the dishes!”
For somehow upon the bright spring landscape a shadow seemed to have fallen; and though Roland carried his point and finished the number of furrows he desired, the sods he turned no longer greeted his nostrils with that sweet odor which had given him such pleasure heretofore, and between himself and the ground appeared all through that afternoon the gentle reproachful face of a mother aggrieved.
CHAPTER XVI.
A MODERN KING ARTHUR.
“The ploughman he’s a bonny lad,
His mind is ever true, jo;
His garters knit below his knee,
His bonnet it is blue, jo.
Then up wi’ my ploughman lad,