Читать книгу The Valley of Squinting Windows онлайн

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"And she used the fine opportunity, I'll warrant, to drag information out of you and carry it all through the valley. That's what she was at! That's what she was at!"

There was a kind of mournful wail in Mrs. Brennan's tones as if she saw in John's action of the morning some irretrievable distance placed between herself and him. The people of the valley loomed ever great as an army between her and the desire of her heart, and John had just now, as it were, afforded an opening to the enemy.

He received a certain amount of hurt from her words, for although he knew her only as his mother and a good woman who was well nigh faultless in her practise of the Christian religion, why was it that this simple action of his, with its slight touch of charity, was resented by her? Yet he allowed her to proceed without question, listening always with that high and fine attention which must have been the attitude of Christ as He listened to His Mother in Galilee.

She painted a picture of the valley for his consideration. She proceeded to do this with a great concern moving her, for she was quick to perceive the change in him since his last holidays. He was a man now, and it was to his manhood condition she appealed. She began to tell him, with such a rush of words, the life-histories of those around him. There was not a slight detail she did not go to great pains to enlarge, no skeleton she did not cause to jump from its cupboard and run alive once more through the valley. She painted a new portrait of every inhabitant in a way that amazed John, who had not known of such things.