The Baker’s Daughter by D. E. Stevenson Page B

quietly and peacefully. All I want is my bed made and an occasional meal.”
    It was perfectly true. Darnay was the most easily pleased man in the world, but Sue had been trained to fight dust—the battle was bred in her bone—and it was quite impossible for her to obey his command and let the dust lie. Besides, she loved the work and went about it with a glow at her heart, for no task, however monotonous or hard, is menial when one serves a king.
    The new happy atmosphere and the daily contact with Darnay’s mind were doing strange things to Sue. She felt the stirring of growth, not consciously but more as a plant must feel its ripening. The river was a thread of melody, running through her life as a thread runs through beads, binding it into a harmonious whole. She heard it all day as she went about the house, but it was at night that she was most conscious of its song. Sometimes in the stillness the sound of the river would change with the rise in the level of its waters and she would hear it swell from a trickle, which splashed over the old wheel, into a turbulent roar like a giant, suddenly enraged—or she would go to sleep with the roar of a rainstorm in her ears and wake to find it past.
    * * *
    Sue had not forgotten her desire to know more about the birds that frequented the place, and Darnay was quite ready to instruct her in their names and habits. In the little patch of garden outside the kitchen window there were dozens of birds that came daily for a largesse of crumbs: tits and wrens and chaffinches and countless numbers of sparrows and a cheeky robin that was Sue’s especial friend. They would hop from twig to twig upon the branches of an old gnarled apple tree or shelter in the beech hedge that still retained its copper-colored leaves.
    â€œHow nice it will be when we have apples!” said Sue one day, when they were leaning out of the kitchen window watching the birds.
    â€œApples!” exclaimed Darnay. “Oh, we shan’t have any apples from that tree. It’s too old. See how gnarled and twisted the branches are, and the little twigs are like an old man’s fingers. If I were a proper gardener, I should cut it down.”
    â€œI’m glad you’re not a proper gardener,” Sue declared.
    â€œThe hedge is nice.” He continued:
    â€œâ€¦deep in brambly hedges dank
    The small birds nip about and say
    Brothers, the Spring is not so far away…
    â€œBut they are wrong, of course,” he added, “for spring is still a long way off. They’ve got to weather the storms of winter first, poor little beggars!”
    â€œPoetry,” said Sue.
    â€œYes, poetry,” he replied, smiling. “No, I can’t remember any more. I’ve got a scrap bag mind, Miss Bun. Just a little bit of this and a little bit of that—not big enough scraps to be of any use except, perhaps, to make a patchwork quilt.”
    Sue was silent. A patchwork quilt made of poetry was a strange idea. A few weeks ago she would have said it was nonsense, but she had learned to see things in his way now.
    â€œDo you like poetry?” Darnay inquired.
    â€œWe had it at school,” said Sue thoughtfully. “‘The Lady of Shalott’ and all that. I didn’t mind it, but it was an awful waste of time getting it off by heart.”
    â€œWhat about Burns?” he asked.
    â€œOh, that’s different—it’s music,” Sue told him.
    â€œAnd ‘The Lady of Shalott’ is a picture,” Darnay declared. “It’s a sort of medieval decoration—a frieze in scarlet and blue and gold. You can see the knights riding by and the barge drifting down the river between the green waving reeds.”
    â€œGo on, I like it,” Sue said.
    â€œHere’s another poem that makes a picture. A modern one this time.
    â€œO fat white woman whom nobody loves,
    Why do you walk through the fields in gloves?”
    â€œI