and blushing behind 'em--all in white they
were, with blue sashes, and voices like larks ... I never had a
daughter...."

He half rose, heavily, leaning on his elbows. "Mind you, there's
something there!" he said slowly.

"There's a Pit below--you have to count on it. Perhaps we're
shovelling it in, all the time, shovelling it in...

"And the more you whistle, the better you'll work, of course. Very
well, then, whistle! But don't mistake--it's there ... it's there."

They drew long breaths and pushed away from the table; the rain had
stopped.

And still in silence they walked out together into the fresh, damp
evening.

THE ORACLES

You'll wonder, no doubt, at me having the daring to make what you might
call a sort of romance out of her life--now all's over. And, of
course, it's not in my way at all. Not but what I've read enough of
romance-books--many's the many! My mother was always at me to lay them
by and take up some bit of work that 'ud bring me in more in the
end--and yet, there's no doubt it was my readings and dreamings and
such-like that brought me about Miss Lisbet's friendship, at the first,
and that friendship was the making of me, one way and another, as
mother never denied.

It was Dr. Stanchon that set me about it. He came into my cottage, a
matter of a month or so back, looking fair grizzled and white--the
heat, he said. And if I knew better, I never said so. He never minded
the heat till this summer. And on his vacation at home, too! But he
showed his age, fair.

"You haven't some kind of drink for me, have you, Rhoda?" he says, sort
of faint-like. "It's been a hard day at the hospital."

Now that might do for some, but not for me, that's known the doctor
fifty-four years come Easter. I looked at the wheels of the gig, and
they were all clay, red clay from the one road hereabouts that's made
of it--the graveyard road. And I knew where he'd been. But of course
I says nothing, but brings him a palm-leaf fan, and seats him out of
the glare, in the entry that looks over the little garden, and I waters
the red bricks of the porch with a spray or two from the garden-pot
(nothing so cooling as watered brick, I say!) and hurries in to beat up
his drink. He settled down in the old chair I always keep for him--a
Windsor, cushioned in some English chintz his wife brought me out from
home, twenty years ago--and I heard him sigh and stretch as I got the
lemons and the eggs. I be