Every one felt the influence of the weather in one way or another. Aunt Cordelia felt it, and it affected her temper, and made her more hard than ever on Audrey's pinafores. Granny Robin felt it, and sometimes was so weary that she laid down her knitting, and sat with folded hands dozing in her chair by the window. Stephen's father felt it, and was obliged to climb out of his window and take his stool and tools under one of the churchyard trees. Audrey felt it, and sat wearily in the close atmosphere of Miss Tapper's academy, and longed for school to be over, that she might get back to Stephen. But the little boy felt it most of all. The flowers on the two graves were drooping with the heat, in spite of all the careful watering they received. And Stephen, the frailest flower of all, was fading also, in spite of the tender care and love of his father. No one thought much of it at first. It was the hot weather, they said, which made him so quiet, and which led him to lie for hours together on a rug which his father spread for him under the lilac bush, unable to play, too weary even to look at pictures, too weak and tired to do anything but watch the swallows flying backwards and forwards, and round and round, as they looked for food for the little birds in the nest. It was the hot weather, they felt sure, which had taken away his appetite, and which had made him look even more thin, and pale, and fragile than he did before. [Illustration: "GRANNY ROBIN, I'VE COME TO TELL YOU A SECRET."] They were all very good to him. Aunt Cordelia would come to her window with a little cake fresh baked from her oven, to tempt him to eat. Audrey would spend all her spare time in reading to him and trying to amuse him. Granny Robin would let him climb inside her window, and lie on her knee for hours together; whilst his father would do anything and everything that he thought would cheer and brighten the child whom he loved so dearly. But although they were all so kind to him, although they all felt that he suffered far more from the intense heat than they did, still none of them were very anxious about him. They had been so long accustomed to his being weak and fragile, that it did not strike them as strange that he should be so completely exhausted by the weather; and they hoped and believed that when cooler days came his strength would return, and that he would be what he had been, and would do what he had been able to do before the hot weather set in.