Page:The Lark - E Nesbit, 1922.djvu/141



great days of our lives seldom bear their names on their foreheads. We get up and come down to our featureless breakfast, read our dullish paper, and tap the barometer and wonder whether it would not be safer, after all, to take an umbrella, remarking that it is certainly colder (or warmer) than it was yesterday, though not nearly so cold (or warm) as it was the day before. Or, not being men and breadwinners, we do not concern ourselves with umbrellas or barometers, but, instead, wonder whether we had better spring-clean the spare room this week or next, and wish that we could think of a perfectly new breakfast dish. But in either case we feel no least suspicion that this is not going to be just another day like all the other days. And we go about our business warmed by no transfiguring hope, frozen by no devastating fear. And then, as life goes running smoothly, or perhaps a little unevenly, but still in its accustomed grooves, suddenly the great thing is upon us—the thing that is to change for good or ill the whole course of our Fate. The loved one who went out with a smile and a careless, gay good-bye is brought home white and still, never to smile here any more; the brother we thought dead comes back to us from the ends of the earth; we lose all our money—or inherit all someone else's money; our sweetheart jilts us—or we see for the first time the eyes that are to be the light of life for us. And we never guessed that this was not to be a day like other days.

So, when Jane and Lucilla walked down to Cedar Court on the morning after the affair of the Strange Man and the