The
slow moving South Saxon cocked a shrewd sceptical eye at him, sized him
up and down and sucked in its cheek refusing to be impressed. While by
untoward accident, his misfortune rather than his fault, the earliest of
his moral sweepings brought him into collision with the most reactionary
element in the community, namely the inhabitants of the black cottages
upon the Island.
The event fell out thus. The days shortened, the evenings lengthened
growing misty and secret as October advanced. The roads became plashy and
rutted, the sides of them silent with fallen leaves under foot. An odd
sense of excitement flickers through such autumn twilights. Boys herded
in little troops on wickedness intent. Whooping and whistling to disarm
their elders' suspicion until the evil deed should be fairly within
reach, then mum as mice, stealthily vanishing, becoming part and parcel
of the earth, the hedge, the harsh dusky grasses of the sand-hills, the
foreshore lumber on the beach.
Late one afternoon, the hour of a hidden sunset, Reginald Sawyer called
at The Hard; and to his eminent satisfaction--for social aspirations were
by no means foreign to him--was invited to remain to tea.
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