Very early next morning Jane-Anne crept out of bed, pulled up her blind,
and seized the volume of poetry Mr. Wycherly had lent her. She read till
her eyes ached and her head swam; she read without the smallest
understanding or enjoyment, but with the greatest care and application,
and though there was much about mountains there was nothing that struck
the faintest chord of memory in Jane-Anne. Whatever it was that her
father had repeated when he used to carry her about, it wasn’t there.
And yet she was certain about "the mountains." Yes, it was "the
mountains."
"I’m afraid he’ll have to look again," she said to herself. She had not
the smallest doubt that Mr. Wycherly would help her.
It was a very hot May, and as the doctor had said she could not be too
much in the fresh air, her aunt, that afternoon, put a little table and
chair for her under the apple-tree, gave her some needle-work, and
bidding her listen for any bell that might happen to ring, announced her
intention of going out to do some household shopping. "Unless anyone
calls to see the master it’s unlikely that anyone’ll come at all," said
Mrs. Dew, "and the front door bell’s that loud you’ll hear it right
enough if so be as you don’t get moonin’. I shan’t be more than a
hour."
Shortly after Mrs. Dew’s departure Mr. Wycherly came to his window and
looked out.
There sat Jane-Anne at the little table covered by a heap of white
sewing, and he thought what a pleasant picture she made in her stiff
buff frock, so maidenly and sweet, so suitably and sensibly employed on
this sunny afternoon in the midst of the green old garden, gay with
tulips and fragrant wallflowers.
Suddenly Jane-Anne stooped down and took off her heavy shoes and there
and then flung them one after another to the other side of the lawn.
Then she removed her stockings. Mr. Wycherly gazed fascinated. What was
the child about?
This was soon deplorably evident.
Jane-Anne was taking off her dress.
Mr. Wycherly felt that he ought to go away from that window, but he
didn’t. He stayed where he was and, what’s more, he placed his
eyeglasses upon his nose.
She gave herself a complicated kind of shake and the buff abomination
fell about her feet in stiff expostulating folds.
Daintily and deliberately, she stepped out of it as though withdrawing
her feet from something dirty and distasteful. She wore a skimpy little
blue-and-white striped petticoat of cotton; body and skirt in one piece
it reached just to her knees, but was sleeveless, and her long, slender
arms were bare.
A thrush was singing in the apple-tree and a blackbird warbled loudly in
a lilac bush trying to drown the thrush. They sang as though there were
no such thing as winter in the world, and neither of them cared a whit
for Jane-Anne and her disrobings.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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