They lifted the prostrate figure gently, and carried it into Jenny Salter’s home; whilst she stood there, silent, pallid, unresisting, as one who has been too much stunned with grief to move. The whole Rantan was in confusion in the lane, the grotesque banners were lowered, the clanging pans were silenced, the lads were gathered in terror-stricken groups, appalled at the consequences of their fun. No one noticed that from the back-door of the cottage an unseen figure had fled into the fields--it was Annie, with wrath and terror in her heart, escaping from this fresh misery in her life. Alas! the poor child--and alas! for such poor children who find their incentives to evil within the shelter of their homes. The Rantan was scattered, dispersed to right and left, its members escaped almost in silence through the streets; there was no bonfire, no concluding ceremony, there had never been a Rantan come to such an end before. Yet it may be that after all it had accomplished more than previous Rantans had done, for issues and sequences are not to be calculated by the careless hands that set such trains on fire. As the corn ripened slowly to its harvest-time, the echoes of that summer evening may have been working still. CHAPTER XIV IN SUMMER DAYS THE August sunshine of a brilliant afternoon was shining upon the yard of the Manor Farm when Mr James Gillan came out from the house, and mounted the horse that the yard-boy held for him. It was an auspicious afternoon for his expedition, the first splendid weather that had been for many days. For it had been a cold summer, and the harvest was very late, the shimmering green of the barley having only just begun to turn pale beneath the sun; though the wheat, more forward, more ready for the reapers, was beginning to ripen to gold beneath its rays. A sober summer! with but little unclouded splendour, with fields softly tinted beneath a fleecy sky; or with shadowy foregrounds and deep blue distances, between which the bright light fell upon the corn--a summer of lights and shades, and of varying circumstances, amidst which the harvest got ready as it could. They talked even in the lane near the Thackbusk of the danger to the crops, though from the Thackbusk gate there was no corn-land to be seen, only willows and marshy fields along which at eventide the sinking sunshine lay in rays of level light. That little lane, where was Jenny’s cottage home, was very quiet and free from disturbance now; the grey cottages stood on one side, and the white upon the other, and on one of the grey walls some pink rosebuds were blooming. No one would have supposed, at sight of its sober look, that the clang of the Rantan had ever echoed there. And yet ...