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that ye scorned the words of your mother and your minister: For its pain and
evil you’ll bring on yourself if your hard heart isn’t changed!"
"There’s pain and evil in roe non I" cried the girl, the tears springing
to her eyes* "But 1*11 thole it - and it wont be on my knees!" and snatching
up a basin she ran out of the kitchen.
Frank, lying below a cart and driving nails into a floorboard, saw her
run across the close into the mealshed. After she had disappeared his strokes
became slow and erratic. At last he laid his ham. or down, and crawling out
walked over to the shed, Sarah, her eyes blinded with tears, was plucking
feverishly at the fastenings of a meal bag* He laid his hands on her shoulders
and turned her towards him. Under his gaze her brirmming eyes dried like
summer pools under a noonday sun. For a moment, but only for a moment, his
lust wavered under her look of supplication. He took the basin from her
nerveless fingers and laid it on the sill. The straw motes circled lazily
upward in the red sunlight.
