he was, and had to be carried up
to bed.

When he awoke next morning his first thought was of his mother. He did
not know why; she was so definitely part of the background of his daily
life that he felt too sure of her continual and abiding presence to need
deliberate thought of her. But this morning he wanted to get up quickly
and find her. Perhaps her absence had made him feel more insecure,
but there had also been something that night, something in her face,
something in the touch of her hand.

And the other thing that he realised was that summer had truly come.
He knew at once that hot smell that pressed even through the closed
window-panes of his room; the bars and squares of light on the floor
when he jumped out of bed and stood upon them seemed to burn the soles
of his feet, and the rays of light on the ceiling quivered as only
summer sunlight can quiver. The two windows of his bedroom looked back
behind Polchester over fields and hedges to a dim purple line of wood. A
tiny stream ran through the first two fields, and this little river
was shining now with a white hot light that had yet the breeze of the
morning ruffling it. He ran to his window and opened it. Beyond the wall
that bordered their house was a little brown path, and down this path,
even as he watched, a company of cows were slowly wandering along.
Already they were flapping their ears lazily in anticipation of the
flies, and the boy who was driving them was whistling as one only
whistles on a summer morning. He could see the buttercups, too, in the
nearest field; they seemed to have sprung to life in the space of a
night. Someone was pulling the rope of a well somewhere and someone else
was pouring water out upon some stone court. Even as he watched, a bee
came blundering up to his window, hesitated for a moment, and then went
whirring off again, and through all the sun and glitter and the sparkle
of the little river there was a scent of pinks, and mignonette, and
even, although it could not really be so, of the gorse. The sky was a
pale white blue, so pale that it was scarcely any colour at all and
a few puffs of clouds, dead white like the purest smoke, hovered in
dancing procession, above the purple wood. The sun burnt upon his bare
feet and his head and his hands.

This coming of summer meant so much more to him than merely the
immediate joy of it--it meant Rafiel and Cow Farm and the Cove and green
pools with crabs in them, and shrimping an