At a Winter's Fire (Short Story Index Reprint Series)

Excerpt: ...enjoying the consciousness of a serene dignity maintained at the expense of much and prolonged self-effacement-this was papa. Grey hair, thinning but slightly near the temples; grey moustache and beard pointed de bouc; flowered dressing-gown girdled about a heart as simple as a child's-this was papa, papa who grubbed over his ordnance surveys while the young folks outside whispered of the stars. Right beneath them-the latter-a broad gully of the hills went plunging precipitously, all rolled with leaf and flower, to the undercliff of soft blue lias and the very roof ridges of King's Cobb, whose walls and chimneys, now snowed with light, fretted a scallop of the striding bay that swept the land here like a scythe. Plancine's village, a lofty appanage or suburb of this little seaboard town at the hill-foot, seemed rather the parent stock from which the other had emancipated itself. For all down the steep slope that fled from Upper to King's Cobb was flung a debris of houses that, like the ice-fall of a glacier, would appear to have broken from the main body and gone careering into the valley below. It was in point of fact, however, but a subordinate hamlet-a hanging garden for the jaded tourist in the dog days, when his soul stifled in the oven of the sea-level cliffs-an eyrie for Plancine, and for George, the earnest painter, a Paradise before the fall. And now says George, "We have talked all round your confession, and still I wait to give you absolution." "I will confess. I read it in one of papa's books that is called the Talmud." "Gracious me you should be careful. What did you read?" "That whoever wants to see the souls of the dead-" "Plancine " "-must take finely sifted ashes, and strew them round his bed; and in the morning he will see their foot-tracks, as a cock's. I did it." "You did?" "Last night, yes. And what a business I had afterwards sweeping them up " "And did you see anything?" "Something-yes-I think so. But it...