Page:Robins - My Little Sister.djvu/29

Rh as those in old days who heard a wolf howl gave thanks for the stout stockade.

More times than I can count I have seen her coming home from one of our walks with that look, half dreaming, half vague apprehension. I have seen her turn that look back on Bettina, lagging: "Soon home, now, little girl. Soon safe in our dear home."

I remember the look of the heath, at dusk, on winter days. The forbidding grey of the sky. The clammy chill. A white fog coming out of the hollows a level mist; not rising high at first, but rolling nearer, nearer, like the ghost of an inundating sea. All the familiar things taking on an unreal look. A silence, and a shivering. Sometimes the dull oppression broken by a birds' note. Harsh and sudden. A danger signal.

I see us linking arms and, with our mother between us, so mend the pace that she would reach home almost breathless. Nevertheless, we would hurry indoors and shoot the bolt behind us like people who knew themselves pursued.

Perhaps my mother's fear had grounds we children never knew. But we knew that the sound of a door shut, and a bolt shot, was music