d paddling and riding home in
the evening on haycarts, and drinking milk out of tin cans, and cows and
small pigs, and peeling sticks and apples, and collecting shells, and
fishermen's nets, and sandwiches, and saffron buns mixed with sand,
and hot ginger beer, and one's ears peeling with the sun, and church on
Sunday with the Rafiel sheep cropping the grass just outside the church
door, and Dick Marriott, the fisherman, and slipping along over the
green water, trailing one's fingers in the water, in his boat, and fishy
smells by the sea-wall, and red masses of dog-fish on the pier, and the
still cool feel of the farmhouse sheets just after getting into bed--all
these things and a thousand more the coming of summer meant to Jeremy.

But this morning he did not feel his customary joy. Closing his window
and dressing slowly, he wondered what was the matter. What could it be?
It was not his eye--certainly it was a funny colour this morning and it
hurt when you touched it, but he was proud of that. No, it was not his
eye. And it was not the dog, who came into his room, after scratching
on the door, and made his usual morning pretence of having come for any
other purpose than to see his friend and master, first looking under the
bed, then going up to the window pretending to gaze out of it (which he
could not do), barking, then rolling on a square of sunlit carpet,
and, after that, lying on his back, his legs out stiff, his ridiculous
"Imperial" pointed and ironical, then suddenly turning, with a twist on
his legs, rushing at last up to Jeremy, barking at him, laughing at
him, licking him, and even biting his stockings--last of all seizing a
bedroom slipper and rushing wildly into the schoolroom with it.

No, there was nothing the matter with Hamlet. Nor was there anything the
matter with Miss Jones, free, happily, from her customary neuralgia,
and delighted with the new number of the Church Times. Nor was it the
breakfast, which to-day included bacon and strawberry jam. Nor, finally,
was it Mary or Helen, who, pleased with the summer weather (and Mary
additionally pleased with the virtues of Lance as minutely recorded in
the second volume of "The Pillars of the House"), were both in the most
amiable of tempers. No, it must be something inside Jeremy himself.

He waited until the end of breakfast to ask his question:

"Can I go and see Mother, Miss Jones?"

Mary and Helen looked across at him inquisitively.

"What do yo