ELSIE'S VISITOR
It was a night or two after our first and (for the time being) last visit to Deep Moat Grange. Elsie and I had arrived back at Nance's, our hands and even our arms laden with flowers. For Nance had been at home all day, and so Elsie and I had been taking a holiday—I from lessons, and Elsie from looking after the house. We had gone wandering over the long whinny knowes which stretch away to the south, till, from the top of Brom Beacon, one can see the ships crowding into the docks of East Dene and Thorsby, collier and tug and tall sea-going brig, every ship after her kind.
It was a day to be remembered, and as a matter of fact neither of us has forgotten it. We crossed Brom Water where it was as broad as a lake. Our conveyance was a penny flatboat, running on a chain, which chain hauled itself up wet and dripping from the bed of the river. A little farther on we stretched ourselves out on the greensward upon a green knoll above a railway cutting. We talked. We were silent, and listened to the the wind among the leaves and the hum of insects among the lime trees and meadow plants. Mr. Mustard was not at all in our thoughts. Nor yet my father in mine. Only one thing troubled me—the knowledge that in the autumn I must leave Breckonside and go to college. College itself I did not mind about. There was a certain amount of fun in being a student—or so I had always been told. What I really did mind about was leaving Elsie.
It would be—I knew it by instinct—like cutting off a part of my own body to go walking lonely on Saturdays when we had so often loitered in company, thinking that the good days would never cease, wanting nothing better, nothing other than just what we had. Ah! I had a prevision that day that Elsie and I had better make the most of our time during this summer. For the winter would try our friendship.
What I did not foresee was how suddenly Elsie would grow up. Yet she had always done things suddenly—from boxing my ears to deciding to continue her studies at home. She did the latter that very day, and in the evening she announced to Nance that she was not going back to school.
"Very well," said Nance, not in the least surprised. Indeed, with her own limited education, she had often wondered why Elsie had prolonged hers so unnecessarily.
It was pleasant in Nance's cottage by the Bridge End of Breckonside. The house was, as perhaps I have already explained, overwhelmed in a perfect show of creeping flowers, not all of them yet in their full bloom of colour, but always spreading up to the chimneys and throwing abroad reckless tendrils that brushed the face as one entered the little wooden porch.
Nance was busy with the supper dishes, and Elsie had come down after "giving her hair a tidy," as she had been commanded by Nance to do.
"Who do you think has been here the day?" said Nance suddenly.
And I knew in a minute, but Elsie guessed her grandfather.