Although it was only five o’clock, the sun had already set and the evening was very still, as all spring evenings are, just before the birds begin to sing themselves to sleep; or maybe tell one another bedside stories. The village was quiet. The men had gone away to fish for the night after working all the morning with the sowing. Women were away milking the cows in the little fields among the crags.
Brigid Gill was alone in her cottage waiting for her little son to come home from school. He was now an hour late, and as he was only nine years she was very nervous about him, especially as he was her only child and he was a wild boy, always getting into mischief, mitching from school, fishing minnows on Sunday and building stone
“castles” in the great crag above the village. She kept telling herself that she would give him a good scolding and beating when he came in, but at the same time her heart was thumping with anxiety and she started at every sound, rushing out to the door and looking down the winding road that was now dim with the shadows of evening. So many things could happen to a little boy.
His dinner of dried fish and roast potatoes was being kept warm in the oven among the peat ashes beside the fire on the hearth, and on the table there was a plate, a knife and a little mug full of buttermilk
At last she heard the glad cries of the schoolboys afar off, and rushing out she saw their tiny forms scampering, not up the road, but across the crags to the left, their caps in their hands.
“Thank God,” she said, and then she persuaded herself that she was very angry. Hurriedly she got a small dried willow rod, sat down on a chair within the door and waited for her little Stephen.
He advanced up the yard very slowly, walking near the stone fence that bounded the vegetable garden, holding his satchel in his left hand by his side, with his cap in his right hand, a red-cheeked slim boy, dressed in a close-fitting grey frieze trousers