that his mother, with the flowers all about her
and the red sky overhead, was like a lady on one of the beautiful
calendars that the grocer gave away at Christmas. He finished his
sweet and started another; he always meant to suck them right
through to make them last longer, but when the sweet was half
finished he invariably crunched it up. His father had done the same
thing as a boy.

The room behind him was getting dark, but outside the sky seemed to
be growing lighter, and mother still stooped from bed to bed, moving
placidly, like a cow. Sometimes she put the watering-pot down on the
gravel path, and bent to uproot a microscopic weed or to pull the
head off a dead flower. Sometimes she went to the well to get some
more water, and then Jack was sorry that he had been shut indoors,
for he liked letting the pail down with a run and hearing it bump
against the brick sides. Once he tapped upon the window for
permission to come out, but mother shook her head vigorously without
turning round; and yet his stockings were hardly wet at all.

Suddenly mother straightened herself, and Jack looked up and saw his
father leaning over the gate. He seemed to be making grimaces, and
Jack made haste to laugh aloud in the empty room, because he knew
that he was good at seeing his father's jokes. Indeed it was a funny
thing that father should come home early from work and make faces at
mother from the road. Mother, too, was willing to join in the fun,
for she knelt down among the wet flowers, and as her head drooped
lower and lower it looked, for one ecstatic moment, as though she
were going to turn head over heels. But she lay quite still on the
ground, and father came half-way through the gate, and then turned
and ran off down the hill towards the station. Jack stood in the
window, clapping his hands and laughing; it was a strange game, but
not much harder to understand than most of the amusements of the
grown-up people.

And then as nothing happened, as mother did not move and father did
not come back, Jack grew frightened. The garden was queer and the
room was full of darkness, so he beat on the window to change the
game. Then, since mother did not shake her head, he ran out into the
garden, smiling carefully in case he was being silly. First he went
to the gate, but father was quite small far down the road, so he
turned back and pulled the sleeve of his mother's dress, to wake her.
After a dreadful while mother got up off the g