'Did they save her?'
'Laws, no! She was all of a jelly.'
Hazel broke out with sudden passionate crying. 'Oh, dunna, dunna!' she sobbed. So she did always at any mention of helpless suffering, flinging herself down in wild rebellion and abandonment so that epilepsy had been suspected. But it was not epilepsy. It was pity. She, in her inexpressive, childish way, shared with the love-martyr of Galilee the heartrending capacity for imaginative sympathy. In common with Him and others of her kind, she was not only acquainted with grief, but reviled and rejected. In her schooldays boys brought maimed frogs and threw them in her lap, to watch, from a safe distance, her almost crazy grief and rage.
'Whatever's come o'er ye?' said her father now. 'You're too nesh, that's what you be, nesh-spirited.'
He could not understand; for the art in him was not that warm, suffering thing, creation, but hard, brightly polished talent.
Hazel stood at the edge of the steep grey cliff, her hands folded, a curious fatalism in her eyes.
'There'll be summat bad'll come to me hereabouts,' she said—'summat bad and awful.'
The dark shadows lying so still on the dirty white mounds had a stealthy, crouching look, and the large soft leaves of a plane-tree flapped helplessly against the shale with the air of important people who whisper 'Alas!'
Abel was on ahead. Suddenly he turned round, excited as a boy.
'They've started!' he cried. 'Hark at the music! They allus begin with the organ.'