"It must have changed quickly then," said the farmer, eyeing the sky through the large old-fashioned kitchen window in front of him. "That's the queer thing hereabouts; many a day if I was put to it to answer, I couldn't say which way the wind was blowing."
"Or which way it wasn't blowing, would be more like it," said Mrs. Conyfer with a smile. "It's to be hoped it'll blow you the right way to school anyway, Gratian. You don't look sure of it this morning!"
"I'm cold, mother, and I've always got to do what I don't want. Last night I didn't want to go to bed, and this morning I didn't want to get up, and now I don't want to go to school, and I must."
He got up slowly and unwillingly and began putting his books together. His mother looked at him with a slight smile on her face.
"'Must''s a grand word, Gratian," she said. "I don't know what we'd be without it. You'll feel all right once you're scampering across the moor."
"Maybe," he replied. But his tone was rather plaintive still. He was feeling "sorry for himself" this morning.
Things in general, however, did seem brighter, as his mother had prophesied they would, when he found himself outside. It was really not cold after all; it was one of those breezy yet not chilly mornings when, though there is nothing depressing in the air, there is a curious feeling of mystery—as if nature were holding secret discussions, which the winds and the waves, the hills and the clouds, the trees and the birds even, know all about, but which we—clumsy creatures that we are—are as yet shut out from.
"What is it all about, I wonder?" said Gratian to himself, as he became conscious of this feeling—an autumn feeling it always is, I think. "Everything seems so grave. Are they planning about the winter coming, and how the flowers and all the tender little plants are to be taken care of till it is over? Or is there going to be a great storm up in the sky? perhaps they are trying to settle it without a battle, but it does look very gloomy up there."
For the grayness had the threatening steel-blue shade over it which betokens disturbance of some kind. Still the child's spirits rose as he ran; there was something reviving in the little gusts of moorland breeze that met him every now and then, and he forgot everything else in the pleasure of the quick movement and the glow that soon replaced the chilly feelings with which he had set out.