the verandas, prone on the paddock, flung over the fences, there were
exhausted-looking bathing-dresses and rough striped towels. Each back
window seemed to have a pair of sand-shoes on the sill and some lumps of
rock or a bucket or a collection of pawa shells. The bush quivered in a
haze of heat; the sandy road was empty except for the Trouts' dog Snooker,
who lay stretched in the very middle of it. His blue eye was turned up,
his legs stuck out stiffly, and he gave an occasional desperate-sounding
puff, as much as to say he had decided to make an end of it and was only
waiting for some kind cart to come along.

"What are you looking at, my grandma? Why do you keep stopping and sort of
staring at the wall?"

Kezia and her grandmother were taking their siesta together. The little
girl, wearing only her short drawers and her under-bodice, her arms and
legs bare, lay on one of the puffed-up pillows of her grandma's bed, and
the old woman, in a white ruffled dressing-gown, sat in a rocker at the
window, with a long piece of pink knitting in her lap. This room that they
shared, like the other rooms of the bungalow, was of light varnished wood
and the floor was bare. The furniture was of the shabbiest, the simplest.
The dressing-table, for instance, was a packing-case in a sprigged muslin
petticoat, and the mirror above was very strange; it was as though a little
piece of forked lightning was imprisoned in it. On the table there stood a
jar of sea-pinks, pressed so tightly together they looked more like a
velvet pincushion, and a special shell which Kezia had given her grandma
for a pin-tray, and another even more special which she had thought would
make a very nice place for a watch to curl up in.

"Tell me, grandma," said Kezia.