"Be out of this," he said; "you degrade yourself. Never let me see you again." Before she had shrunk away he had stooped to the huddled creature at his feet, had covered her with his arms and was whispering urgent comfort in her ear, caressing her with voice and hands. Bessie Prawle could not show herself to the neighbours for the rest of the summer and early autumn. She became a solitary; the neighbours said that she was in a decline.
The drought, with all the troubles it entailed of plague, pestilence and famine, continued through August and September. It did not really break till All-Hallow's, and then, indeed, it did.
The day had been overcast, with a sky of a coppery tinge, and intensely dry heat; a chance puff of wind smote one in the face, hot as the breath of a man in fever. The sheep panted on the ground, their dry tongues far out of their mouths; the beasts lay as if dead, and flies settled upon them in clouds. All the land was of one glaring brown, where the bents were dry straw, and the heather first burnt and then bleached pallid by the sun. The distance was blurred in a reddish lurid haze; Knapp Fell and its forest were hidden.
Mabilla, the dumb girl, had been restless all day, following Andrew about like a shadow. The heat had made him irritable; more than once he had told her to go home and she had obeyed him for the time, but had always come back. Her looks roamed wide; she seemed always listening; sometimes it was clear that she heard something--for she panted and moved her lips. There was deep trouble in her eyes too; she seemed full of fear. At almost any other time her husband would have noticed it and comforted her. But his nerves, fretted by the long scorching summer, were on this day of fire stretched to the cracking point. He saw nothing, and felt nothing, but his own discomfort.
Out on the parched fell-side Bessie Prawle sat like a bird of omen and gloomed at the wrath to come.
Toward dusk a wind came moaning down the valley, raising little spires of dust. It came now down, now up. Sometimes two currents met each other and made momentary riot. But farm-work has to get itself done through fair or foul. It grew dark, the sheep were folded and fed, the cattle were got in, and the family sat together in the kitchen, silent, preoccupied, the men oppressed and anxious over they knew not what. As for those two aliens, Miranda King and Mabilla By-the-Wood, whatever they knew, one of them made no sign at all, and the other, though she was white, though she shivered and peered about, had no means of voicing her thought.