Miriam rose to help with the pots.
`Let me help to wash up,' she said.
`Certainly not,' cried Annie. `You sit down again. There aren't many.'
And Miriam, who could not be familiar and insist, sat down again to look at the book with Paul.
He was master of the party; his father was no good. And great tortures he suffered lest the tin box should be put out at Firsby instead of at Mablethorpe. And he wasn't equal to getting a carriage. His bold little mother did that.
`Here!' she cried to a man. `Here!'
Paul and Annie got behind the rest, convulsed with shamed laughter.
`How much will it be to drive to Brook Cottage?' said Mrs Morel.
`Two shillings.'
`Why, how far is it?'
`A good way.'
`I don't believe it,' she said.
But she scrambled in. There were eight crowded in one old seaside carriage.
`You see,' said Mrs Morel, `it's only threepence each, and if it were a tram-car--'
They, drove along. Each cottage they came to, Mrs Morel cried:
`Is it this? Now, this is it!'
Everybody sat breathless. They drove past. There was a universal sigh.
`I'm thankful it wasn't that brute,' said Mrs Morel. `I was frightened.' They drove on and on.
At last they descended at a house that stood alone over the dyke by the highroad. There was wild excitement because they had to cross a little bridge to get into the front garden. But they loved the house that lay so solitary, with a sea-meadow on one side, and immense expanse of land patched in white barley, yellow oats, red wheat, and green root-crops, flat and stretching level to the sky.
Paul kept accounts. He and his mother ran the show. The total expenses--lodging, food, everything-- was sixteen shillings a week per person. He and Leonard went bathing in the morning. Morel was wandering abroad quite early.
`You, Paul,' his mother called from the bedroom, `eat a piece of bread-and-butter.'
`All right,' he answered.
And when he got back he saw his mother presiding in state at the breakfast-table. The woman of the house was young. Her husband was blind, and she did laundry work. So Mrs Morel always washed the pots in the kitchen and made the beds.
`But you said you'd have a real holiday,' said Paul, `and now you work.'