He helped, too, to carry out “crowse”—­the midmorning lunch—­to the men, and he wandered about with the crowds of stray children and patted the unresponsive dogs, and was admired by the women and bored by them, and himself partook of big saffron buns, that Marjorie said would spoil his dinner, but that didn’t.  Nothing, he felt, could have spoilt anything that day.

With evening and the last whirring of the thresher Ishmael, watching him at play, felt, as he always had, that it is impossible to watch children without an ache for the inevitable pity of it that they should have to grow up.  It was not, he felt, because they are particularly happy—­for never again can there be griefs blacker than those which darken all a child’s horizon, but simply because they stand for something beautiful which can never come again.  Now, looking at Jim and the other children, he felt the old pity, but tinged with something new.  For the first time he saw that it was only by realising that children were symbols, the mere passing exponents of a lovely thing which was itself ever present, that it became possible to look at them without that aching.  There would always be, he supposed, some people who could look at children and feel, not so much pity that these young things must age as self-pity that they themselves had lost childhood; but others looked as he always had, with a more impersonal pang, sorry that so beautiful a thing should fade.  And it was for the comfort of such as he to realise that it did not matter in the least, because, though children grew up and away, childhood remained—­a bright banner carried from hand to hand, always in a new grasp before the old one could tarnish it.  More, he saw that it was this very evanescence which had for him given childhood its sadness that also gave it its beauty; if there were anywhere on earth a race of perpetual children it would not be beautiful.  For he saw that it was the inevitable slipping-away of all life which gave poignancy to loveliness.

He spoke something of his thought to Lissa, and she nodded in comprehension.

“That’s why no picture or sculpture can be as beautiful as the human model,” she said, “not because of any necessary inferiority, but simply in the terrible permanence of man’s work as compared with God’s.”

They stood a while longer side by side, and then Jimmy, who with the last whirring note of the thresher suddenly felt very tired, came and leant up against his grandfather.  Ishmael stooped over the boy, and with a great heave, despite Marjorie’s protests—­she had come out to take her son to bed—­he hoisted him up to his old bowed shoulder.

“Say good-night to the thresher,” he told him.  “You are going to bed, and it is going to bed too.”

“Is it very tired?” asked Jimmy.

“Yes, nicely tired, like you when you have been running about all day.”

“Not nasty tired like I am after lessons?”

“No, not nasty tired.”