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"Well" -her head drooped a little to the side"--not quite a real house, but ... but it'll be a dwelling place of sorts. And we can stay here the winter and won't have to worry. And we could make a fireplace inside, eh Jimmy?"

Jimmy blinked, his face thoughtful; then he said, "It'll be the roof.

How you goin' to put a roof on? Rafters and that; we haven't any wood.

"

They all looked at her as she thought for a moment Presently she said,

"They'll be cutting trees down at Lord Fischel's place come September.

The carpenters and coach builders and people like Matthew have picked their trees, and the sawers cut them down and branch them. An' if you know anybody there you can always get bits and pieces. Matthew'll get us some. Anyway, we'll leave that until we come to it; it's getting'

the walls up that's goin' to be the thing. To start with, we'll all carry stones from the quarry and when we get a fair amount I'll put Joe and Charlotte on puddlin' mud down by the burn. You'd like that, wouldn't you" -she bent down towards them, her face bright"--pledging in mud?" And they laughed and said, "Aye, Cissie, aye we'd like that."

"And then the time you, William, and you, Bella and Sarah, are carryin'

stones, Jimmy and me will be puttin' them up. We'd do most on a Sunday, but if there's plenty of stones gathered I could be getting' at it during the week on me own.... Come on." She bounced to her feet.

"Get into your things quick and have your porridge and then we'll get started."

Their eagerness as they tumbled out of bed was shown in varying degrees, and not all enthusiastic.

A few minutes later. Jimmy, pointing to the shale, said, "You won't be able to do it, our Cissie, 'cos you can't dig in that sort of foundation."

She stared down at the rock, her face blank now, then said, "We'll stick plenty of mud on, then set the first stones in it. That should do it."

When he made no answer to this she looked at him appealing and muttered under her breath, "Our Jimmy, we've got to try something.

Remember last night, and the winter isn't on us yet; we've just got to try, even if it does blow down. "

"Aye, Cissie, aye," he said.

It had sounded like fun when she suggested their carrying of the stones, but the actual work proved an

e impossible task for the young ones; even Jimmy and William could only carry medium-sized ones over the distance. It was after the dinner of rabbit and turnips that Jimmy got the idea of using one of the pit methods for conveying the stones from the quarry to the cave.

He took a nine-inch board from one of the beds, which meant they would have to sleep head to toe. He sawed it in two and nailed the pieces together;

then, burning a hole in each end with a heated poker, he slotted a length of rope through, and on to this rough sledge he tied the biggest and flattest pieces of sandstone he could find, and with the aid of William he pulled them over the rough ground.

It was late in the afternoon, after they had stacked up about forty pieces of stone of varying sizes, when Matthew came to the cave. There was no one about, but his eyes were immediately drawn to the heap of stones near the entrance. Then in the distance he saw Cissie staggering towards him, her arms cradling a slab that brought her body almost double. He did not run towards her for some seconds, and when he did he took the stone from her before exclaiming, "God above! What are you up to now?"

"Oh!" She straightened her back and flexed her arms.

"We're going to build walls round the entrance to keep out the weather."

He turned and looked at her but didn't speak until he had dropped the sandstone among the rest; then, dusting the yellow grit from the sleeves of his Sunday jacket, he said, "But you don't intend to stay here the winter, do you?"

The smile went from her face; her eyes, looking back into his, held the defiant light he had come to know over the weeks, and her voice was flat as she asked him, "Where would we go then?" For answer, he said,

"It's hell up here in the winter. You know it is. It's bad enough under a good roof. You'd all perish."

"Well, if we perish we'll perish together; we're not going into the house, I've told you."

"I wasn't meaning you to go into the house. I ... Well, with the lads working I thought you might be able to find a place somewhere."

Again she asked him a question, "Where?" and when his eyes turned from hers she did not say what was in her mind, "You know you can't get a pit house, or a farm cottage around here unless you're married. And I couldn't get a permit to go to another parish because with having no man they'd be feared we'd end up on the rates" ; but what she did say was, "I wouldn't go into the towns, either Jarrow or Shields, not into those stinking hovels. And they ask as much as three shillings a week, so ..."

She moved away from him now, saying, "If it's big enough we could have a fireplace inside." Then turning quickly to him again, she said, "Do you think you might be able to get us some branches to go across the top? We could stick mud at ween them. And away down the river there's a reed bed; we could sort of thatch it in a rough way."

He stared at her as he said, "I'll get you all the rough wood you want.

I'll be going for my timber in three weeks' time. But you don't want rough wood for up there" --he lifted his eyes to where the level of the roof would come above the opening of the cave-- "you want beams; and well battened down on supports, for a gale of wind could lift the whole lot off. And another thing ..." He now stamped one toot on the shale and shook his head slowly as he said, "It'll never hold. I mean you've got to have a foundation;

that's the main thing. "

She put her fingers to her lips now and turned her head away, saying,

"Our Jimmy said that, but I thought that if I got a lot of mud and stuck the bricks in it, it would be all right."

He was shaking his head again. Then, still staring at the rock, he said, "The only way it would hold as I

can see is to roughen it, use a pick on it, so the mortar'll get a purchase. "

"Would that do it?" There was eagerness in her voice now.

"It might; and if you roughed your mortar with bits of chips and pebbles and used sandy mud.... There's a patch of it at yon side of the bum; I'll show you. It means pledging across every time but it'll be worth it in the long run.... Have you a pick?" he now asked.

"A pick? Oh yes. And it's a good pick, it was me da's." She hurried into the cave and came out with the pick to see him taking his coat off and laying it neatly to one side. When he took the pick from her hand, she said, "But you're not going to ... ?" and he replied on a laugh,

"Well, do you think I'm goin' to stand and watch you doin' it?"

He was holding her gaze again. And now she could not return the look in his eyes and her head drooped and she turned away, saying, "It's kind of you."

He said nothing to this but asked, "How big do you want it?" then watched her walking seven steps from the entrance of the cave. Her pacing brought her feet almost to the point of his, and when, still looking at the ground, she said, "About here," he did not answer or move. She lifted her head up. His face seemed to be hanging above hers; his lips were apart, his eyes unblinking, and he said softly, "I think you're a wonderful lass, Cissie."

The heat that swept over her body brought beads of perspiration on to her upper lip and her forehead. It brought her heart pumping so strongly under her bodice that she saw the rapid rise and fall of the buttons, and the heat brought with it a sweetness that she could taste in her mouth and smell with her nostrils. It brought with it a joy that made her want to run as she had sometimes done when alone on the fells, when the air had cut sharp against her throat and the sky was blue and endless and everythinp clean looking.

And then the sweat, the color, and the sweetness seeped swiftly away to leave her cold as she r membered the woman in the mill who had given them the tea and bread, and whose ugly face had softened as she looked at him and whose voice had sounded musical when she had said his name.

And she remembered also that he was Matthew Tumbull, the wheelwright, who worked to support his paralyzed father, his mother, his grandmother, and his aunt. He was Matthew Turnbull who was lucky in a way to be favored by Rose Watson, the daughter of the miller, who was a very warm man, so why was he saying to her "You're a wonderful lass"

Perhaps because he was of a kindly nature. But the look in his eyes was not that which just came from a kindly nature; she had seen that kind of look before. Now and again her da had looked at her ma like that, sometimes after a baim was born.

She turned slowly from him, knowing his eyes were tight on her, and she made her way to where the children were dragging the stone-laden sledge, and she had reached them before she heard the first metallic sound of the pick striking the stone.

That night she had the dream of the white house again but it was so enveloped in light that she couldn't make out any part of it.

The wheelwright's shop stood at the end of the village of Benham.

There were about thirty houses all told in the village and James Tumbull's house was the largest, except for the inn at the other end of the street. The shop itself had the appearance of a stable, having two large double doors that opened outwards into the street. There was a window at each side, and the roof sloped up steeply above the actual shop, and under the apex, set partly in plaster, was a wheel, the hub cracked, the felloes springing out here and there from the rim. It looked, as it had done for the last fifty years, as if it were going to fall from the face of the wall.

At one side of the shop was the yard. It was a big yard and held various neat stacks of timber, besides odd piles. Two old farm carts stood in one corner and a saw pit ran along one wall. At the far end of the yard was a stable with a loft above.

On the other side of the shop was the house. It had a good-sized kitchen and scullery downstairs, besides a small parlor, three bedrooms above, and, lastly, an attic. This latter was Matthew's room, as it had been from the age of five when his grandmother and Aunt Mildred had come to live with them.

Although a six-room house with five people in it could be considered almost empty, Matthew felt the place so crowded that he was barely able to breathe in it. This^ iarpression was caused, he knew, by his grandmother's and his aunt's constant presence in the kitchen, and had been added to over the last three years by his father's prone figure in the bedroom and the fact that they all now looked to himself for survival.

Matthew's life, until the day he had been called over to Brookdale to make the coffins for a Mr. and Mrs. Brodie, had, he would have said, run smoothly, and this in spite of times being bad. When the prosperity of farms went down the demands for carts and wheels and repairs went down; as for households, old buckets weren't renewed but puttied. Still, he made enough to feed them, and keep on one man. And there was no need to really worry about not being able to manage, for always in the back of his mind was the life belt in the form of Rose Watson. He knew he had only to say the word and Rose would be his, together with all she would own when her father died, and such a decision would mean living at the mill. But that could only bring pleasure; what didn't bring him pleasure was the thought of Rose herself.

Rose, he considered, was a good lass. She was a wonderful cook and fine housewife, none better, as the mill house showed, and her nature was pleasant, at least to him, although he had heard it said she had a temper. But it wasn't her temper that would worry him, it was the looks of her, the big bulk of her. Yet, as he told himself time and time again, such women generally made admirable wives and mothers; but he also told himself that he had no feeling for her one way or the other, except that she evoked pity in him.

That was how he was feeling prior to making the coffins for the Brodies. Then he had met Cissie; and from the first moment when he had stood in that room which was reeking with death and looked at her, so young, so slight, so lovely, he had known he would never feel the same again. And that experience on the road when she had dissolved into light had set the seal on his life. And as he watched her fight to hold that squad of children together his love for her had rolled away with him, as he put it to himself, like four brand-new wheels on a wagon. Had she stood alone he would have defied his mother and his grannie and brought her into the house.

After his visit last Sunday he knew he must stop seeing her; because she was no fool, she knew what was in his mind, and it wasn't fair, seeing that nothing could come of it. He reasoned that as soon as she got the ramshackle structure up he would cut adrift, but first he must see the place right, before the winter set in.

Sunday, in his home, ran to a pattern. In the morning he drove his mother and his Aunt Mildred in the cart to church; he would sit in the back row and, except when Parson Hedley was preaching the sermon, he would think not of God or religion in any form, but of things that were of importance to him. Until recently, his thoughts had centered around his work, or the lack of it, or the injustices being bailed out to his kind. Sometimes his mind would go over what had taken place at the meeting in Parson Hedley's house the previous night, for Saturday night was the time when he and a few others went for their writing lesson, and the reading. But of late his mind had dwelt on Cissie Brodie and, not unconnected, the demanding needs of his body.

When they returned from the church the dinner would be ready--his grannie bestirred herself once a week to do this task. The dinner served, he would carry a tray up to his father and as he helped him to feed himself he would give him the gist of Parson Hedley's sermon.

He liked his father and it pained him to see him bereft of movement.

It was strange how things happened. If he had had to have his back broken you would have thought it would have been while in the sawing pit where he had stood since he was a small boy pulling on one end of the saw while his father above him pulled on the other. But no, it had to be the slipping of a badly stacked tree, the stacking incidentally which he had done himself, that had brought him to this state.