," she
cried shrilly.

Trewhella, having surveyed Jenny's defenses, began his usual slow
advance.

"What nobody here seems to understand is my feelings when I seed my
missus making a mock of holy things."

"Oh, rats!" cried Jenny, flouncing angrily from the room.

Nothing could persuade her to humor Zachary so far as to go to chapel a
second time. It pleased her to contemplate his anxiety for the spiritual
welfare of the unborn child. "I wish you'd wrastle with the devil a bit
more," he said. But she would only set her lips obstinately, and perhaps
under his mother's advice, Zachary gradually allowed the subject to
drop.

Jenny and May went often to the cliffs in the fine weather, mostly to
Crickabella (such was Granfa's name for their favorite slope), where
summer marched by almost visibly. The sea-pinks turned brown, the
sea-campion decayed to an untidy mat of faded leaves and flowers.
Bluebells came up in asparagus-like heads that very soon broke into a
blue mist of perfume. The ferns grew taller every day, and foxgloves
waved right down to the water's edge. On the moorland behind the cliffs,
heather and burnet roses bloomed with azure scabious and white
mothmulleins, ladies' tresses and sweet purple orchids. Here and there
grew solitary columbines, which Jenny thought were lovely and carried
home to Granfa, who called them Blue Men's Caps. Remote from curious
eyes, remote from life itself save in the progress of inanimate things
towards the accomplishment of their destiny, she dreamed unceasingly day
after day amid the hollow sounding of the ocean, watching idly the
metallic green flight of the shags, the timorous adventures of rock
pipits, and sometimes the graces of a seal.

With the advance of summer Jenny began to dread extremely the various
insects and reptiles of the country. It was vain for Thomas to assure
her that apple-bees did not sting without provocation, that eeriwigs
were not prone to attack, that piskies were harmless flutterers and
neither Johnny Jakes nor gram'ma sows actively malicious. These rural
incidents of a wasp on a hat or a woodlouse in a sponge were to her
horrible events which made her tremble in the recollection of them long
afterwards. The state of her health did not tend to allay these terrors,
and because Crickabella was comparatively free from insects, that lonely
green escarpment, flung against the black ramparts of the towering
coast, was more than ever dear to Jenny.

I