The rude stool was always placed inside the fireplace, which was very broad for burning wood, faggots and split pieces of timber.
Bending over the grey ashes, she could see right up the great broad tunnel of the chimney to the blue sky above, which seemed the more deeply azure, as it does from the bottom of a well.

In the evenings when she looked up she sometimes saw a star shining above.

In the early mornings of the spring, as she came rushing down to breakfast, the tiny yellow panes of the window which faced the east were all lit up and rosy with the rays of the rising sun.
The beautiful light came through the elms of the rickyard, away from the ridge of the distant Down, and then for the first hour of the day the room was aglow.

For quite two hundred years every visible sunrise had shone in at that window more or less, as the season changed and the sun rose to the north of east.

Perhaps it was that sense of ancient homeliness that caused Cicely, without knowing why, to steal in there alone to dream, for nowhere else indoors could she have been so far away from the world of to-day.
Left much to herself, she roamed along the hedgerow as now and then a mild day came, soon after the birds had paired, and saw the arrow-shaped, pointed leaves with black spots rising and unrolling at the sides of the ditches.