"It will be all right in a minute," said Mary confidently. "'Was she in
a shop? And was that really--was it really a ship that was sitting on
the counter?'" she finished with a run.

"A what?" asked Jeremy.

"A ship--"

"A ship! How could it sit on a counter?" he asked.

"Oh no, it's a sheep. How silly I am!" Mary exclaimed.

"You do read badly," he agreed frankly. "I never can understand
nothing." And it was at that very moment that he saw the Dog.

II

He had been staring down into the garden with a gaze half abstracted,
half speculative, listening with one ear to Mary, with the other to
the stir of the fire, the heavy beat of the clock and the rustlings of
Martha the canary.

He watched the snowy expanse of garden, the black gate, the road beyond.
A vast wave of pale grey light, the herald of approaching dusk, swept
the horizon, the snowy roofs, the streets, and Jeremy felt some contact
with the strange air, the mysterious omens that the first snows of the
winter spread about the land. He watched as though he were waiting for
something to happen.

The creature came up very slowly over the crest of Orange Street. No
one else was in sight, no cart, no horse, no weather-beaten wayfarer. At
first the dog was only a little black smudge against the snow; then,
as he arrived at the Coles' garden-gate, Jeremy could see him very
distinctly. He was, it appeared, quite alone; he had been, it was
evident, badly beaten by the storm. Intended by nature to be a rough
and hairy dog, he now appeared before God and men a shivering battered
creature, dripping and wind-tossed, bedraggled and bewildered. And
yet, even in that first distant glimpse, Jeremy discerned a fine
independence. He was a short stumpy dog, in no way designed for
dignified attitudes and patronising superiority; nevertheless, as he now
wandered slowly up the street, his nose was in the air and he said to
the whole world: "The storm may have done its best to defeat me--it has
failed. I am as I was. I ask charity of no man. I know what is due to
me."

It was this that attracted Jeremy; he had himself felt thus after a
slippering from his father, or idiotic punishments from the Jampot, and
the uninvited consolations of Mary or Helen upon such occasions had been
resented with so fierce a bitterness that his reputation for sulkiness
had been soundly established with all his circle.

Mary was reading...! "'an old Sheep, sitting in an arm-chair, kn