He tried for an instant to think, gave up the effort, laid his head on her shoulder, and said:
“I don’t know and don’t care. Say I am not to do rosa, rosæ!”
“What! not if papa wished it?”
“I hate the Latin grammar!”
For a while both remained silent. Judith felt the tension to which her mind and nerves had been subjected, and lapsed momentarily into a condition of something like unconsciousness, in which she was dimly sensible of a certain satisfaction rising out of the pause in thought and effort. The boy lay quiet, with his head on her shoulder, for a while, then withdrew his arms, folded his hands on his lap, and began to make a noise by compressing the air between the palms.
“There’s a finch out there going ‘chink! chink!’ and listen, Ju, I can make ‘chink! chink!’ too.”
Judith recovered herself from her distraction, and said:
“Never mind the finch now. Think of what I say. We shall have to leave this house.”
“Why?”
“Of course we must, sooner or later, and the sooner the better. It is no more ours.”