"Indeed, then I won't! When I did last time, she told me to tell him to go down to the weighing place on the wharf and ring a bell, and call the population together, and read out to them all the places in the Bible that refer to hypocrisy, lying, and scandal, the sins of adultery, fornication, and the begetting of bastards; that she'd be willing to pay him treble his fee for the charity of it, they need it so much. It might teach them to begin at home and let other folks alone."
"Shall I tell him that?" eagerly.
"Are you mad? No, tell him Mistress is reading herself, and ask him to stay and have a good cup of coffee and sweet rusks. I want to get the truth out of him about the magistrate's girl's illness; he was up there, and I don't believe a sniff in her sprained foot—"
And down below the rose-buds opened into roses, and nodded with the effrontery of assured beauty to the sun-god; and the birds hushed them for their noon siesta; and he lay with shut eyes and held her hand tightly; and sometimes he spoke to her, and sometimes he muttered to himself (she caught the words) a line of his favorite Mangan:—
"Sleep! no more the dupe of hopes and schemes,
Soon thou sleepest where the thistles blow!
Curious anticlimax to thy dreams
Twenty golden years ago!"
The odd unpleasant smell seems to hang about them as if too heavy to diffuse itself in the thin, clear air; the smell of cow-sheds that clings to the cow-girl's clothes is perfume to it. It attracted the flies, and they gathered like swarming bees on the window-panes and door-posts, and buzzed and hummed and stung like Bushmen carousing over a find of dead meat; and they crept over the bed and stuck in his hair, and she tried to keep them off his face; and when one of them crawled up her own with tickling, clinging feet, she paled and shuddered. The cow-girl stepped out of her clogs, and went into the drawing-room and brought out a gayly painted palm-leaf fan, and stationing herself at the head of the bed set it in motion. His breathing is getting labored, and at times an ugly flush crosses his face. Once when it is deeper than usual, the girl cries,—
"O Lord God! Lord God!"