The more he gazed at her the redder and more uncomfortable she
became.
"You can have my new c--c--catapult," he whispered once, giving
her a tearful, imploring look, that she interpreted as an entreaty
to stay safely at home.
At last the clock had travelled up to eight, and the children being
engaged in a wordy warfare over the possession of a certain stray
dog that had come to Misrule in the afternoon, she slipped out of
the room unobserved. No one was in the hall, and she picked up
the becoming, fleecy cloud she had hidden there, twisted it round
her head, and crept out of the side door and along the first path.
Down in the garden the ground was white with fallen rose leaves,
and the air full of their dying breath; a clump of pampas grass
stood tall and soft against the sky; some native trees, left
growing among the cultivated shrubs, stretched silver-white
arms up to the moon and gave the little hurrying figure a ghostly
kind of feeling. Out of the gate and into the first paddock,
where the rose scent did not come at all, and only a pungent smell
of wattle was in the thin, hushed air. More gum trees, and more
white, ghostly arms; then a sharp movement near the fence, a thick,
sepulchral whisper, and a stifled scream from Meg.
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