“Not till it was nearly dark. We ran in this way, you know, after we came out of Winfried’s path,” said Mavis.
“Oh, yes, I remember,” Ruby replied, and a half dreamy look stole over her face.
They were standing on the lower terrace. This side of the castle, as I have said, was much more sheltered and protected than the other, but still already in November it was bleak and bare. The evergreen shrubs had begun to look self-satisfied and important, as I think they always do in late autumn, when their fragile companions of the summer are shivering together in forlorn misery, or sinking slowly and sadly, leaf by leaf, brown and shrivelled, into the parent bosom of Mother Earth, always ready to receive and hide her poor children in their day of desolation. Nay, more, far more than that does she for them in her dark but loving embrace; not a leaf, not a tiniest twig is lost or mislaid—all, everything, is cared for and restored again, at the sun’s warm kiss to creep forth in ever fresh and renewed life and beauty. For all we see, children dear, is but a type, faint and shadowy, of the real things that are.
Then a strange sort of irritation came over Ruby. The soft wondering expression so new to her disappeared, and she turned sharply to Mavis.
“Rubbish!” she said. “Of course they were there yesterday. But they shan’t be there to-morrow—here goes;” and she bent down to pick the little flowers.
Mavis stopped her with a cry.
“Don’t gather them, Ruby,” she said. “Poor little things, they might stay in their corner in peace, and we could come and look at them every day. They’d wither so soon in the house.”
Ruby laughed. She was much more careless than actually unkind, at least when kindness cost her little.
“What a baby you are,” she said contemptuously. “You make as much fuss as when I wanted to take the thrush’s eggs last spring. Wouldn’t you like to give your dear Winfried a posy of them?”
“No,” Mavis answered, “he wouldn’t like us to gather them; there are so few and they do look so sweet.” The next day was clear and bright, but cold; evidently winter was coming now. But old Bertha had started the fires at last, as the date on which it was the rule at the castle for them to begin on was now past. So inside the house it was comfortable enough—in the inhabited part of it at least; though in the great unused rooms round the tiled hall, where all the furniture was shrouded in ghostly-looking linen covers, and up the echoing staircase, and up still higher in the turret-rooms where the wind whistled in at one window and out again at the opposite one, where Jack Frost’s pictures lasted the same on the panes for days at a time—dear, dear, it was cold, even Bertha herself allowed, when she had to make her weekly tour of inspection to see that all was right.