_BOOK II._
CHAPTER I.
THE HAND THAT BECKONED.
It was evening. Caius was watering his father's horses. Between the
barns and the house the space was grass; a log fence divided it, and
against this stood a huge wooden pump and a heavy log hollowed out for a
trough. House and barns were white; the house was large, but the barns
were many times larger. If it had not been that their sloping roofs of
various heights and sizes formed a progression of angles not unpleasant
to the eye, the buildings would have been very ugly; but they had also a
generous and cleanly aspect which was attractive.
Caius brought the horses to the trough in pairs, each with a hempen
halter. They were lightly-built, well-conditioned beasts, but their days
of labour had wrought in them more of gentleness than of fire. As they
drank now, the breeze played with their manes and forelocks, brushing
them about their drooping necks and meek faces. Caius pumped the water
for them, and watched them meditatively the while. There was a fire low
down in the western sky; over the purple of the leafless woods and the
bleak acres of bare red earth its light glanced, not warming them, but
showing forth their coldness, as firelight glancing through a
window-pane glows cold upon the garden snows. The big butter-nut-tree
that stood up high and strong over the pump rattled its twigs in the
air, as bare bones might rattle.
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