‘Yes,’ said Mary, with a helpless laugh. ‘She’s gone!’
‘Gone? Why, the girl must be mad!’
Again Mary laughed at the wide astonishment in Mrs Mamble’s eyes. Another flash followed and the old woman wrapped up her head again, waiting for the thunder. It came with a crash, right overhead, and the house shook. Mary suddenly remembered the children, who were playing in the parlour.
‘Do go and see to them, Mrs Mamble,’ she said. ‘There’s a dear.’
She herself could not move. She went on folding her linen. It seemed as if she must find some mechanical task for her hands to do. In a moment Mrs Mamble returned to say that the children were not in the least frightened. She kept dodging in and out of the house all afternoon for fear of the storm returning and catching her unawares, telling of the damage that the rain might have done to the hay lying out in the meadows or to the standing corn.
‘But there’s no denying that it’s wanted,’ she said inconsequently.
By the time that Abner left work that evening the storm had rolled away, rumbling over the treetops of Bringewood Chase. All day he had worked under the heavy sky, breathing an air that was dead and choked with dust. Now the vault was clear and brilliant as that of an evening in spring. The smell of dust rose from the road, blackbirds were singing, and from the pale, steaming hayfields waves of sweetness drifted across his path. His steps were light and his heart happy.
Mary received him as usual and gave him his tea. He laughed with her over the violence of the storm and asked her gaily if the doctor had been to take the splint off Gladys’s leg.
‘We must put by a shillin’ or two for that,’ he said. For the moment he was so full of his own content that he had scarcely noticed her preoccupation; but when he mentioned money she made a quick, instinctive movement, as though she wanted to speak and to refuse it. Little by little he began to realise that she was trying to avoid him and sometimes leaving his questions unanswered.
‘What’s up with you, missus?’ he said.