n if Norah had not
said that he need not be there at the moment of departure, he would
have been unable to remain. He could not stand by and see her piteous
face, her slender figure, her forlorn gestures, while they carried her
off--the poor little weak thing sent away from hearth and home, cast
out among strangers because any spot on the earth, however bare or
hard, had become a better shelter for her than the place that should
have been sacredly secure.

He walked heavily, with a leaden heart and leaden feet; his eyes
downcast, not glancing at the dark trees on one side or the bright
fields on, the other. But after passing the first of the woodland
paths and before coming to the second, he looked up. He had heard the
sound of many footsteps and the murmur of many voices. All those
blue-cloaked orphans, two and two, an endless procession, were
advancing toward him.

Never had the sight and the sound of them been so horribly distasteful
to him. They were still a long way off, and he thought he could dodge
them, at any rate avoid meeting them face to face, if he hurried on to
the second footpath and dived into the wood there. But then it seemed
as if he had stupidly miscalculated the distance, or that his legs
were failing him, or that the girls came sweeping down the road at an
impossibly rapid pace; so that they were right upon him just as he
reached the stile. He drew aside, and, feeling that it was too late
now to turn his back, watched them as they passed.

The mistresses must have issued a sudden order of silence, for they
all went by without so much as a whisper. There were fifty of them,
but they seemed to be thousands. Dressed in their light blue summer
cloaks, golden-haired, brown-haired, a very few black-haired, they
passed two by two, with the little ones first, and bigger and bigger
girls behind--an ascending scale of size, so that he had the illusion
of seeing a girl grow up under his eyes, change in a minute instead of
in years from the small sexless imp that is like an amusing toy, to
the full-breasted creature that is so nearly a woman as to be
dangerous to herself and to everybody else.

Not one of them spoke, but all of them, little and big, looked at
him--very shyly, and yet with intense interest. He stood staring after
them, and presently their tuneful young voices sounded again, filled
the air with virginal music. He swung his leg over the stile, and
went along the path through the trees where