“So he is; but they are not.”
“To be sure! to be sure! Poor things! poor things!”
They tread out stealthily on the sward, where the morning meets them in its still wet splendour of dew and flower. The young sun has flung away the thin rosy scarves that lightly swathed him at his birth, and is magnificently wheeling up the eastern sky. In the shortening shadows the pale green leaves of the late tulips carry little globes of bright moisture upon them, and their gallant deep cups still hold some of the wine of the dawn.
“The servants tell me that they were walking along the line. How came they to be walking along the line?”
“They were late, and afraid of keeping Sir George waiting. It was the shortest way home.” The rector’s wife pauses, her dead-white face and sunken eyes turning towards the glory-promising mist, through which the trees, fields, oast-houses of the weald, dwindled by distance, are beginning to pierce. Her voice sounds like that of one reciting a lesson, which she knows will have to be infinitely repeated.
“And then?”
“They heard the train coming up behind them, and Lavinia looked round to see how near it was, and saw the child on the line.”
“Whose child was it?” asks Mrs. Prince, with an irrelevant curiosity which jars—if anything can still jar upon nerves so strung and tense—on her hearer.
“It was the pointsman, George Bates’s. The mother had run in next door to speak to a neighbour, and left it alone in the house!”
“It is a scandal that such a thing should be allowed! A child of two left alone in a house!”