Page:Possession (Roche, February 1923).pdf/30

 "Good morning. Will ye take porridge?"

"Please. And bacon and eggs, Mrs. Machin."

"You don't want them all at once, do ye?" she answered sharply.

"Oh, no," he said, feeling rebuffed. He took his place at the table, and hoped she noticed his displeased silence while she served him. But he could not remain displeased; the food was good, his appetite sharp; he smiled at her like a boy, in spite of himself.

"What's the excitement in the kitchen?" he asked.

"Oh, that's PhoebePhœbe [sic] separatin'. She always hollers when she does it. I'll tell her to stop."

But the machine was stopping with a slow, whining rasp. Mrs. Machin went out. Silence prevailed in the kitchen. He heard PhoebePhœbe [sic] go singing towards the barn.

A door opened from the dining room on the flagged yard. He stood there in the sunshine looking over his new possessions. A wide, rolling field stretched before him to the bank of the stream, and rose beyond it in a high, level meadow, fringed with warped trees whose stems and limbs were bent in a single direction, away from the gently rippling lake, cowered in their old age from the mutable master who had so cruelly lashed them when they were but striplings.

But the stately group of trees about the house, whose massive trunks supported such a fragile foliage that it scarcely threw a shade, seemed never to have been fretted, but towered in upright dignity above the solid walls. No shrubs or hedges softened the stern aspect of the place. Grimstone fronted an unbroken view of cliff, and lake, and sky. Yet all was not harshness, for a cherry orchard, in