As they entered the farmhouse kitchen Mason hastened to pick up the chairs he had overturned in his sudden waking.
"I say, mother would be mad if she knew you'd come into this scrow!" he said with vexation, kicking aside some sporting papers that were littered over the floors, and bringing forward a carved oak chair with a cushion to place it before the fire for her acceptance.
"Scrow? What's that?" said Laura, lifting her eyebrows. "Oh, please don't tidy any more. I really think you make it worse. Besides, it's all right. What a dear old kitchen!"
She had seated herself in the cushioned chair, and was warming a slender foot at the fire. Mason wished she would take off her hat--it hid her hair. But he could not flatter himself that she was in the least occupied with what he wished. Her attention was all given to her surroundings--to the old raftered room, with its glowing fire and deep-set windows.
Bright as the April sun was outside, it hardly penetrated here. Through the mellow dusk, as through the varnish of an old picture, one saw the different objects in a golden light and shade--the brass warming-pan hanging beside the tall eight-day clock--the table in front of the long window-seat, covered with its checked red cloth--the carved door of a cupboard in the wall bearing the date 1679--the miscellaneous store of things packed away under the black rafters, dried herbs and tools, bundles of list and twine, the spindles of old spinning wheels, cattle-medicines, and the like--the heavy oaken chairs--the settle beside the fire, with its hard cushions and scrolled back. It was a room for winter, fashioned by the needs of winter. By the help of that great peat fire, built up year by year from the spoils of the moss a thousand feet below, generations of human beings had fought with snow and storm, had maintained their little polity there on the heights, self-centred, self-supplied. Across the yard, commanded by the window of the farm-kitchen, lay the rude byres where the cattle were prisoned from October to April. The cattle made the wealth of the farm, and there must be many weeks when the animals and their masters were shut in together from the world outside by wastes of snow.