'Dunna kick about so!' said Abel, emerging from his abstraction. 'It inna decent, now you're an 'ooman growd.' 'I'm not an 'ooman growd!' cried Hazel shrilly. 'I dunna want to be, and I won't never be.' The pine-tops bent in the wind like attentive heads, as gods, sitting stately above, might nod thoughtfully over a human destiny. Someone, it almost seemed, had heard and registered Hazel's cry, 'I'll never be an 'ooman,' assenting, sardonic. They came to the quarry at the mountain; the deserted mounds and chasms looked more desolate than ever in the spring world. Here and there the leaves of a young tree lipped the grey-white steeps, as if wistfully trying to love them, as a child tries to caress a forbidding parent. They climbed round the larger heaps and skirted a precipitous place. 'I canna bear this place,' said Hazel; 'it's so drodsome.' 'Awhile since, afore you were born, a cow fell down that there place, hundreds of feet.' 'Did they save her?' 'Laws, no! She was all of a jelly.' Hazel broke out with sudden passionate crying. 'Oh, dunna, dunna!' she sobbed. So she did always at any mention of helpless suffering, flinging herself down in wild rebellion and abandonment so that epilepsy had been suspected. But it was not epilepsy. It was pity. She, in her inexpressive, childish way, shared with the love-martyr of Galilee the heartrending capacity for imaginative sympathy. In common with Him and others of her kind, she was not only acquainted with grief, but reviled and rejected. In her schooldays boys brought maimed frogs and threw them in her lap, to watch, from a safe distance, her almost crazy grief and rage. 'Whatever's come o'er ye?' said her father now. 'You're too nesh, that's what you be, nesh-spirited.' He could not understand; for the art in him was not that warm, suffering thing, creation, but hard, brightly polished talent. Hazel stood at the edge of the steep grey cliff, her hands folded, a curious fatalism in her eyes. 'There'll be summat bad'll come to me hereabouts,' she said--'summat bad and awful.' The dark shadows lying so still on the dirty white mounds had a stealthy, crouching look, and the large soft leaves of a plane-tree flapped helplessly against the shale with the air of important people who whisper 'Alas!' Abel was on ahead. Suddenly he turned round, excited as a boy. 'They've started!' he cried. 'Hark at the music! They allus begin with the organ.' Hazel followed him, eager for joy, running obedient and hopeful at the heels of life as a young lamb runs with its mother. She forgot her dark intuitions; she only remembered that she wanted to enjoy herself, and that if she was a good girl, surely, surely God would let her. Chapter 8