The two girls sat perfectly still. Frances watched certain objects in her surroundings: they had a peculiar, unfriendly look about them: the weight of greenish elderberries on their purpling stalks; the twinkling of the yellowing crab-apples that clustered high up in the hedge, against the sky: the exhausted, limp leaves of the primroses lying flat in the hedge-bottom: all looked strange to her. Then her eyes caught a movement. A mole was moving silently over the warm, red soil, nosing, shuffling hither and thither, flat, and dark as a shadow, shifting about, and as suddenly brisk, and as silent, like a very ghost of _joie de vivre_. Frances started, from habit was about to call on Anne to kill the little pest. But, today, her lethargy of unhappiness was too much for her. She watched the little brute paddling, snuffing, touching things to discover them, running in blindness, delighted to ecstasy by the sunlight and the hot, strange things that caressed its belly and its nose. She felt a keen pity for the little creature. “Eh, our Fran, look there! It’s a mole.” Anne was on her feet, standing watching the dark, unconscious beast. Frances frowned with anxiety. “It doesn’t run off, does it?” said the young girl softly. Then she stealthily approached the creature. The mole paddled fumblingly away. In an instant Anne put her foot upon it, not too heavily. Frances could see the struggling, swimming movement of the little pink hands of the brute, the twisting and twitching of its pointed nose, as it wrestled under the sole of the boot. “It _does_ wriggle!” said the bonny girl, knitting her brows in a frown at the eerie sensation. Then she bent down to look at her trap. Frances could now see, beyond the edge of the boot-sole, the heaving of the velvet shoulders, the pitiful turning of the sightless face, the frantic rowing of the flat, pink hands. “Kill the thing,” she said, turning away her face. “Oh—I’m not,” laughed Anne, shrinking. “You can, if you like.” “I _don’t_ like,” said Frances, with quiet intensity. After several dabbling attempts, Anne succeeded in picking up the little animal by the scruff of its neck. It threw back its head, flung its long blind snout from side to side, the mouth open in a peculiar oblong, with tiny pinkish teeth at the edge. The blind, frantic mouth gaped and writhed. The body, heavy and clumsy, hung scarcely moving. “Isn’t it a snappy little thing,” observed Anne twisting to avoid the teeth. “What are you going to do with it?” asked Frances sharply. “It’s got to be killed—look at the damage they do. I s’ll take it home and let dadda or somebody kill it. I’m not going to let it go.” She swaddled the creature clumsily in her pocket-handkerchief and sat down beside her sister. There was an interval of silence, during which Anne combated the efforts of the mole. “You’ve not had much to say about Jimmy this time. Did you see him often in Liverpool?” Anne asked suddenly.