Page:Stringer - Wine of Life.djvu/314



ORRIE THROSSEL and her husband had been three weeks at " Pine-Brae," as Amasa Kirkner had once christened the Ontario fruit-farm which sloped down from The Ridge to the slate-cliffs overlooking the tumbling blue waters of Lake Erie.

It was high noon of a flawless June-end day. Flat on his back, on a Navajo rug stretched out in a grassy hollow along the cliff-edge, lay Storrow with a sweat- stained felt hat pulled low over his tanned and stubbled face, to keep the sun out of his eyes. Slightly higher up on the sloping shelf of greensward lay Torrie, bare- headed, in a soiled " middy-blouse " and a much crumpled skirt of duck. She had kicked off her incongruous jet- beaded slippers, and lay on her stomach with her chin in her hands and her silk-stockinged feet drumming lazily and intermittently on the turf. She stared at her hus- band, who after a morning of farm-toil seemed glad enough of this half -hour of contented and animal-like inactivity.

" You lazy hound," she said sleepily and affectionately as she tossed a handful of grass along his hat-rim. But he neither moved nor spoke. Then she sat up and stared at the red-brick house shaded by its cluster of lordly pines. She could see Absalom, the aged negro man- servant who had so recently been transported from the neighbouring county-seat to Pine-Brae, slowly and croon- ingly clearing the dinner table that had been set in the cooler shadow of the side-porch with its bright new awn- ings of taupe and willow-green stripes. Absalom, who boasted of having been a chef of fame in his younger 304