not have done if he had been in the garden.  Also he had some sweets in his pocket, bought with a halfpenny stolen from his own money-box, and as the window did not taste very nice he slipped one into his mouth and sucked it with enjoyment.  He did not like being in the parlour, because he had to sit there with his best clothes on every Sunday afternoon and read the parish magazine to his sleepy parents.  But the front window was lovely, like a picture, and, indeed, he thought that his mother, with the flowers all about her and the red sky overhead, was like a lady on one of the beautiful calendars that the grocer gave away at Christmas.  He finished his sweet and started another; he always meant to suck them right through to make them last longer, but when the sweet was half finished he invariably crunched it up.  His father had done the same thing as a boy.

The room behind him was getting dark, but outside the sky seemed to be growing lighter, and mother still stooped from bed to bed, moving placidly, like a cow.  Sometimes she put the watering-pot down on the gravel path, and bent to uproot a microscopic weed or to pull the head off a dead flower.  Sometimes she went to the well to get some more water, and then Jack was sorry that he had been shut indoors, for he liked letting the pail down with a run and hearing it bump against the brick sides.  Once he tapped upon the window for permission to come out, but mother shook her head vigorously without turning round; and yet his stockings were hardly wet at all.

Suddenly mother straightened herself, and Jack looked up and saw his father leaning over the gate.  He seemed to be making grimaces, and Jack made haste to laugh aloud in the empty room, because he knew that he was good at seeing his father’s jokes.  Indeed it was a funny thing that father should come home early from work and make faces at mother from the road.  Mother, too, was willing to join in the fun, for she knelt down among the wet flowers, and as her head drooped lower and lower it looked, for one ecstatic moment, as though she were going to turn head over heels.  But she lay quite still on the ground, and father came half-way through the gate, and then turned and ran off down the hill towards the station.  Jack stood in the window, clapping his hands and laughing; it was a strange game, but not much harder to understand than most of the amusements of the grown-up people.

And then as nothing happened, as mother did not move and father did not come back, Jack grew frightened.  The garden was queer and the room was full of darkness, so he beat on the window to change the game.  Then, since mother did not shake her head, he ran out into the garden, smiling carefully in case he was being silly.  First he went to the gate, but father was quite small far down the road, so he turned back and pulled the sleeve of his mother’s dress, to wake her.  After a dreadful while mother got up off the ground with her skirt all covered with