Edmund was at that time a quiet, thoughtful little boy, apt to ask questions which it puzzled his mother to answer. The neighbours said he thought too much and ought to be made to play more; but they liked him because of his good looks and quaint, old-fashioned good manners. Except when he fired questions at them.

“I shan’t tell you,” some one would say when cornered by him. “If I told you that you’d know as much as I do myself. Besides, what do it matter to you what makes the thunder and lightning. You sees it and hears it and are lucky if you’re not struck dead by it, and that ought to be enough for you.” Others, more kindly disposed, or more talkative, would tell him that the thunder was the voice of God. Somebody had been wicked, perhaps Edmund himself, and God was angry; or that thunder was caused by the clouds knocking together; or warn him to keep away from trees during a thunderstorm because they had known a man who was struck dead while sheltering and the watch in his pocket had melted and run like quicksilver down his legs. Others would quote:

Under oak there comes a stroke,

Under elm there comes a calm,

And under ash there comes a crash,

and Edmund would retire into himself to sort out this information.

He was a tall, slender child with blue eyes and regular features. When she had dressed him for their afternoon walk, his mother would kiss him and exclaim: “I do declare he might be anybody’s child. I can’t see any difference between him and a young lord, and as for intelligence, he’s too intelligent!”

Setting out on these walks, Laura must have looked a prim, old-fashioned little thing in her stiffly starched frock, with a white silk scarf tied in a bow under her chin and a couple of inches of knicker frill showing. “Odd,” the neighbours called her when discussing her in her presence, for she had dark eyes and pale yellow hair, and they did not approve of the mixture. “Pity she ain’t got your eyes,” they would say to her mother whose own eyes were blue; “or even if she had dark hair like her father, ‘twouldn’t be so bad, but, as ‘tis, she ain’t neither one thing nor t’other. Cross-grained, they say them folks is whose eyes and hair don’t match. But,” turning to Laura, “never you mind, my poppet. Good looks ain’t everything, and you can’t help it if you did happen to be behind the door when they were being given out. And, after all,” comfortingly to her mother, “she don’t hurt, really. She’s got a nice bit of colour in her cheeks.”