He loved beauty, and the roads around Glen St Mary were beautiful. The road to Lowbridge was a double ribbon of dancing buttercups, with here and there the ferny green rim of an inviting grove. But today Dad didn’t seem to want to talk much and he drove Grey Tom as Walter never remembered seeing him driven before. When they reached Lowbridge he said a few hurried words aside to Mrs Parker and rushed out without bidding Walter good-bye. Walter had again hard work to keep from crying. It was only too plain that nobody loved him. Mother and Father used to, but they didn’t any longer. The big, untidy Parker house at Lowbridge did not seem friendly to Walter. But perhaps no house would have seemed that just then. Mrs Parker took him out to the backyard, where shrieks of noisy mirth were resounding, and introduced him to the children, who seemed to fill it. Then she promptly went back to her sewing, leaving them to ‘get acquainted by themselves’… a proceeding that worked very well in nine cases out of ten.
