In the kitchen of the big house two girls stood by the window peeping
out into the garden and giggling.
"There he is again," said Laura. "Sh! don't laugh so loud. There! now
he's stopping again!"
"He's whistling to a bird," said Oliana. "Or talking to himself perhaps.
Do you think he's quite right in his head?"
"Sh! The mistress'll hear."
It was no less a person than the master of Loreng himself whose
proceedings struck them as so comic.
Peer it was, wandering about in the great neglected garden, with his
hands in the pockets of his knickerbockers and his cap on the back of
his head, stopping here and there, and moving on again as the fancy
took him. Sometimes he would hum a snatch of a song, and again fall
to whistling; here he would pick up a twig and look at it, or again
it might be a bird, or perhaps an old neglected apple-tree that seemed
worth stopping to talk to. The best of it was that these were his own
lands and his own woods that lay there in the rusty October sunshine.
Was all that nothing? And the hill over on the farther shore, standing
on its head in the dark lake-mirror, clothed in a whole world of
colour--yellow leaves and green leaves, and light red and dark red, and
golden and blood-red patches, with the dark green of the pines between.
His eyes had all this to rest on. Did he really live here? What abundant
fruitfulness all around him! What a sky, so wide, so golden that it
seemed to ring again. The potato-stalks lay uprooted, scattered on the
fields; the corn was safely housed.
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