To their left, keeping watch over the graves which
encircled it, rose the fourteenth-century church; amid the trees around
it rooks were cawing and wheeling; and close beneath it huddled other
cottages, ivy-grown, about the village well. Afternoon school was just
over, and the children were skipping and running about the streets.
Through the cottage doors could be seen occasionally the gleam of a fire
or a white cloth spread for tea. For the womenfolk, at least, tea was
the great meal of the day in Beechcote. So that what with the flickering
of the fires, and the sunset light on the windows, the skipping
children, the dogs, the tea-tables, and the rooks, Beechcote wore a
cheerful and idyllic air. But Mrs. Roughsedge knew too much about these
cottages. In this one to the left a girl had just borne her second
illegitimate child; in that one farther on were two mentally deficient
children, the offspring of feeble-minded parents; in the next, an old
woman, the victim of pernicious anaemia, was moaning her life away; in
the last to the right the mother of five small children had just died in
her sixth confinement. Mrs. Roughsedge gave a long sigh as she looked at
it.
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