Harvest

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

V

The little town of Millsborough was en fête. There was a harvest festival going on, and the County Agricultural Committee had taken the opportunity to celebrate the successful gathering of the crops, and the part taken in it by the woman land-workers under their care. They had summoned the land lasses from far and wide; in a field on the outskirts of the town competitions had been in full swing all the morning, and now there were to be speeches in the market-place, and a final march of land girls, boy scouts, and decorated wagons to the old Parish Church, where a service was to be held.

All Millsborough, indeed, was in the streets to look at the procession, and the crowd was swelled by scores of cadets from a neighbouring camp, who were good-heartedly keeping the route, and giving a military air to the show. But the flower-decked wagons were the centre of interest. The first in the line was really a brilliant performance. It was an old wagon of Napoleonic days, lent by a farmer, whose forebears had rented the same farm since William and Mary. Every spoke of the wheels blazed with red geraniums; there was a fringe of heather along the edge of the cart, while vegetables, huge marrows, turnips, carrots, and onions dangled from its sides, and the people inside sat under a nodding canopy of tall and splendid wheat, mixed with feathery barley. But the passengers were perhaps the most attractive thing about it. They were four old women in lilac sunbonnets. They were all over seventy, and they had all worked bravely in the harvest. The crowd cheered them vociferously, and they sat, looking timidly out on the scene with smiling eyes and tremulous lips, their grey hair blowing about their wrinkled, wholesome faces.

Beside the wagon walked a detachment of land girls. One of them was the granddaughter of one of the old women, and occasionally a word would pass between them.

"Eh, Bessie, but I'd like to git down! They mun think us old fools, dizened up this way."

"No, gran; you must ride. You're the very best bit of the show. Why, just listen how the folk cheer you!"

The old woman sighed.

"I'd like to look at it mysel'," she said with a childish plaintiveness. But her tall granddaughter, in full uniform, with a rake over her shoulder, thought this a foolish remark, and made no reply.

In the second wagon, Rachel Henderson in full land-dress—tunic, knee-breeches, and leggings—stood in the front of the cart, guiding two white horses, their manes and tails gaily plaited with ribbons, and scarlet badges on their snowy heads.

"Eh, but yon's a fine woman!" said an old farmer of the humbler sort to his neighbour. "Yo'll not tell me she's a land lassie?"

"Noa, noa; she's the new farmer at Great End—a proud body, they say, an' a great hustler! The men say she's allus at 'em. But they don't mind her neither. She treats 'em well. Them's her two land girls walking beside."

For Betty and Jenny mounted guard, their harvest rakes on their shoulders, beside their mistress, who attracted all eyes as she passed, and knew it. Behind her in the cart sat Janet Leighton; and the two remaining seats were filled by the Vicar of Ipscombe and Lady Alicia Shepherd, the wife of the owner of Great End Farm and of the middle-sized estate to which the farm belonged.

Lady Alicia was a thin woman, with an excitable temperament, to judge from her restless mouth and eyes, which were never still for a moment. She was very fashionably dressed and held a lace parasol. The crowd scarcely recognized her, which annoyed her, for in her own estimation she was an important member of the Women's Committee which looked after the land girls. The war had done a great deal for Lady Alicia. It had dragged her from a sofa, where she was rapidly becoming a neurasthenic invalid, and had gradually drilled her into something like a working day. She lived in a flurry of committees; but as committees must exist, and Lady Alicias must apparently be on them; she had found a sort of vocation, and with the help of other persons of more weight she had not done badly.

She did not quite understand how it was that she found herself in Miss Henderson's wagon. The committee had refused to have a wagon of its own, and the good-natured vicar had arranged it for her. She did not herself much like Miss Henderson. Her husband had sent her to call upon the new tenants, and she had been much puzzled. They were ladies, she supposed. They spoke quite nicely, and Miss Henderson seemed to be the daughter of a clergyman. But she was afraid they were dreadful Socialists! She had talked to Miss Henderson about the awful—the wicked—wages that the Brookshire board had just fixed for the labourer.

"My husband says they'll simply crush the life out of farming. We shall all be ruined, and where will the labourer be then?"

And Miss Henderson had looked quite unpleasant. It was high time, she said, that the labourer should have enough to live on—decently; really thrown the word at you. And Colonel Shepherd had told his wife that he understood from Hastings Miss Henderson had raised her wages before the award of the Wages Board. Well, he only hoped the young woman had got some money behind her, otherwise she would be finding herself in Queer Street and he would be whistling for his rent.

The wagons drew up in the centre of the market-place, and the band which the cadets had brought with them struck up "God Save the King." Lady Alicia rose at once and nudged her little boy, whom she had brought with her, to take off his cap. She looked approvingly over the crowd, which was growing denser and denser every moment. It was so that she really enjoyed the populace—at a safe distance—and ready to lend itself to the blandishments of its natural leaders. Where was her husband, Colonel Shepherd? Of course they would want him to speak at some time in the proceedings. But she looked for him in vain.

Meanwhile, the speaking was beginning from the first cart. A land girl who had played a rousing part in the recruiting campaign of the early summer was speaking in a high voice, clearly heard by the crowd. She was tall and pretty, and spoke without a sign of hesitation or self-consciousness. She gloried in the harvest, in the splendid news from the war, in the growth of the Woman's Land Army. "We've just been proud to do our bit at home while our boys have been fighting over there. They'll be home soon, perhaps, and won't we give them a welcome! And we'll show them the harvest that we've helped to reap—the biggest harvest that England's ever known!—the harvest that's going to beat the Boche." The young simple voice flowed on, with its simple story and its note of enthusiasm, and sometimes of humour. "It's hard work, but we love it! It's cold work often, but we love it! The horses and the cows and the pigs—they're naughty often, but they're nice!—-yes, the pigs, too. It's the beasts and the fields and the open air we love!"

Betty looked at Jenny with a grin.

"Jenny!—them pigsties yesterday; d'ye think she's ever cleaned one out?"

"I know she has," said Jenny confidentially. "She's Farmer Green's girl, out Ralstone way. Ee says there ain't nothing she can't do. Ee don't want no men while he's got 'er. They offered him soldiers, and ee wouldn't have 'em."

* * * * *

"Silly, sentimental young woman," said a tall man, with a pipe in his mouth, who had just lounged up to the outskirts of the crowd, from a side street. "Who's she going to take in here? What's the good of talking poetry about farming to a lot of country people? A London shop-girl, I guess. What does she know about it?"

"You bets she knows a lot," said a young man beside him, who, to judge from his uniform, was one of the Canadians employed at Ralstone camp. He had been taken with the "sentimental young woman," and was annoyed by the uncivil remarks of his neighbour. "Wonder what farm she's on?"

"Oh, you know these parts?" said the other, removing his pipe for a moment and looking down on his companion.

"Well, not exactly." The reply was hesitating. "My grandfather went out to Canada from a place near here sixty years ago. I used to hear him and my mother talk about Millsborough."

"Beastly hole!" said the other, replacing his pipe.

"I don't agree with you at all," said the other angrily. "It's as nice a little town of its size as you'd find anywhere."

The other shrugged his shoulders. A man a few yards off in the crowd happened at that moment to be looking in the direction of the two speakers. It was the ticket-collector at the station, enjoying an afternoon off. He recognized the taller of the two men as the "dook" he had seen at Millsborough station about a week ago. The man's splendid carriage and iron-grey head were not to be mistaken—also his cadaverous and sickly look, and his shabby clothes. The ticket-collector saw that the man was holding the dark-eyed, "furrin-looking" child by the hand, which the woman he met had brought down with her. "Furriners," he supposed, all of them; part of that stream of fugitives from air raids that had been flowing out of London during the preceding winter, and was now flowing out again, as the next winter approached, though in less volume. Every house and lodging in Millsborough was full, prices had gone up badly, and life in Millsborough was becoming extremely uncomfortable for its normal inhabitants—"all along o' these panicky aliens!" thought the ticket-collector, resentfully, as he looked at the tall man.

The tall man, however, was behaving as though the market-place belonged to him, talking to his neighbours, who mostly looked at him askance, and every now and then breaking into a contemptuous laugh, provoked apparently by the eloquence of the young woman in the wagon. Meanwhile the little girl whose hand he held was trying to pull him into a better place for seeing the rest of the procession. For from the place where they stood on the outskirts of the crowd, the foremost wagon with its nodding wheat and sheaves, its speaker, its old women, and its bodyguard of girls entirely hid the cart behind it.

"Dis way, pappa, dis way," said the child, dragging him. He let her draw him, and suddenly from behind the speaker's cart there emerged the second wagon with its white horses; Rachel Henderson, the observed of all beholders, standing flushed and smiling, with the reins in her hands, the vicar just behind her, and Lady Alicia's lace parasol.

"My God!" said the man.

His sudden start, and clutch at the child's hand made the child cry out. He checked her with a savage word, and while she whimpered unheeded, he stood motionless, sheltering himself behind a girl with a large hat who stood in front of him, his eyes fixed on the Great End wagon. A ghastly white had replaced the patchy red on his cheeks, and had any careful observer chanced to notice him at the moment, he or she would have been struck by the expression of his face—as of some evil, startled beast aware of its enemy, and making ready to spring.

But the expression passed. With a long breath, Roger Delane pulled himself together.

"Hold your noise, Nina," he said roughly to the child. "If you'll be a good girl, I'll put you on my shoulder."

The child stopped crying at once, and Delane, raising her on to his shoulder, pulling his own soft hat over his eyes and placing the child so that her dress concealed his own features. Then he resumed an excited scrutiny of the Great End wagon. At the same moment he saw a man in uniform making his way through the crowd towards Miss Henderson who was waving to him. An officer—an American officer. Delane recognized at once the high collar and the leathern peak to the cap.

The crowd had already begun to cheer him. He reached the Great End wagon, and its mistress, all smiles, bent over to speak to him. She and the vicar seemed to be giving directions, to which the American with a laughing shrug assented, going off to the front wagon, evidently in obedience to orders. There the girl speaker had just sat down amid a hearty cheer from the crowd; and the chairman of the meeting, a burly farmer, eagerly came to the side of the wagon, and helped the American officer into the cart. Then with a stentorian voice the chairman announced that Captain Ellesborough from Ralstone camp had come "to tell us what America is doing!" A roar from the crowd. Ellesborough saluted gaily, and then his hands in his pockets began to talk to them. His speech, which was a racy summary of all that America was doing to help the Allies, was delivered to a ringing accompaniment of cheers from the thronged market-place, rising to special thunder when the captain dwelt on the wheat and bacon that America was pouring across the Atlantic to feed a hungry Europe.

"We've tightened our own belts already; we can tighten them, I dare say, a few holes more. Everybody in America's growing something, and making something. When a man thinks he's done enough, and wants to rest a bit, the man next him gets behind him with a bradawl. There's no rest for anybody. We've just registered thirteen million men. That sounds like business, doesn't it? No slacking there! Well, we mean business. And you mean business. And the women mean business."

Then a passage about the women, which set the land girls grinning at each
other, and at the men in the crowd, ending in three cheers for Marshal
Foch and Sir Douglas Haig, which came echoing back from the Fourteenth
Century church and the old houses which ringed the market-place.

All eyes were on the speaker, no one noticed the tall man with the olive-skinned child on his shoulder. He himself, with thumping pulses, never ceased to watch the figures and movements in the second wagon. He saw Miss Henderson sit down and another woman also in tunic and knickers take her place. He watched her applauding the speaker, or talking with the clergyman behind her, or the lady with the lace parasol. And when the speech was over, amid a hurricane of enthusiasm, when the resolution had been put and carried, and the bells in the old church-tower began to ring out a deafening joy-peal above the dispersing crowd, he saw the American officer jump down from the speaker's wagon and return to Miss Henderson. Steps were brought, and Captain Ellesborough handed out the ladies. Then he and Rachel Henderson went away side by side, laughing and talking, towards the porch of the church, where Delane lost them from sight.

The market-place emptied rapidly. The decorated wagons moved off to the field where the competitions had been held in the morning, and some of the crowd with them. Another portion streamed into the church, and soon only a few scattered groups were left.

The tall man put down the child, and was seized with a fit of coughing, which left him more pallid and sunken-eyed than before. When it was over, he noticed a group of elderly labourers. They had come late into the meeting, and were making for the bar of the Cow-roast Inn, but before they entered it Delane went up to one of them.

"I'm a stranger here," he said carelessly. "Can you tell me who all these people were in the wagons?"

The man addressed—who was old Halsey—gave the speaker a reconnoitring look.

"Well, I dunno neither," he said cautiously, "leastways, many of 'em.
There was my old missus, in the first one. She didn't want to go, dressed
up in them sunbonnets. But they made such a fuss of her, she had to.
There was Farmer Broughton I seed, an' I don't know nobody else."

"Well, but the second wagon?" said Delane impatiently.

"Oh, the second wagon. Why, that was Miss Henderson. Don't ye know 'er? I works for 'er?"

"Is she on the land?"

The old man laughed.

"That she be! She's a farmer, is Miss Henderson, an' she frames pretty fair. She don't know much yet, but what she don't know Hastings tells, her."

"Who's Hastings?"

"Why, her bailiff, to be sure. You do be a stranger, not knowin' Muster
Hastings?"

"I'm just here for a few weeks. It's a rum business, isn't it, this of women taking farms?"

Halsey nodded reflectively.

"Aye, it's a queer business. But they do be cleverer at it than ye'd think. Miss Henderson's a good head-piece of her own."

"And some money, I suppose?"

"Well, that's not my look out, is it, so long as I gits my wages? I dessay Colonel Shepherd, ee sees to that. Well, good-day to you. I'm goin' in to get summat to drink. It's a dryin' wind to-day, and a good bit walk from Ipscombe."

"Is that where you live?"

"Aye—an' Miss Henderson's place is just t'other side. A good mile to Ipscombe, and near a mile beyont. I didn't want to come, but my old woman she nagged me to come an' see her 'ome."

And with another nod, the old man turned into the public, where his mates were already enjoying the small beer of the moment.

For a few minutes, Delane strolled down the main road in silence, the child playing at his heels. Then he turned abruptly, called the child, and went up the side street from which he had appeared when the meeting began.

A quarter of an hour later he returned to the market-place alone. The service in the church was still going on. He could hear them singing, the harvest hymn: "We plough the fields and scatter—The good seed on the land." But he did not stop to listen. He walked on rapidly in the direction of Ipscombe.

Delane found the main line from Millsborough to Ipscombe dotted at intervals with groups of persons returning from the harvest festival—elderly women with children, a few old labourers, a few soldiers on leave, with a lively fringe of noisy boys and girls skirmishing round and about their elders, like so many young animals on the loose. The evening light was failing. The pools left by a passing shower, gleamed along the road, and the black elms and oaks, scarcely touched as yet by autumn gold, stood straight and sharp against a rainy sky.

The tall, slouching man scrutinized the various groups as he passed them, as though making up his mind whether to address them or not. He wore a shabby greatcoat, warmer than the day demanded, and closely buttoned across the chest. The rest of his dress, felt hat, dark trousers, and tan boots, had all of it come originally from expensive shops, but was now only just presentable. The one thing in good condition about him was the Malacca cane he carried, which had a carved jade handle, and was altogether out of keeping with his general appearance.

All the same there was something striking in that appearance. Face, figure and dress represented the wreck of more than one kind of distinction. The face must once have been exceptionally handsome, before an underlying commonness and coarseness had been brought out or emphasized by developments of character and circumstance. The mouth was now loose and heavy. The hazel eyes had lost their youth, and were disfigured by the premature wrinkles of either ill-health or dissipation. None the less, a certain carriage of the head and shoulders, a certain magnificence in the whole general outline of the man, especially in the defiant eyes and brow, marked him out from the crowd, and drew attention of strangers.

Many persons looked at him, as he at them, while he swung slowly along the road. At last he crossed over towards an elderly man in company with a young soldier, who was walking lamely with a stick.

"Excuse me," he said, formally, addressing the elder man, "but am I right for Ipscombe?"

"That you are, muster. The next turnin' to the right'll bring yer to it." Peter Betts looked the stranger over as he spoke, with an inquisitive eye.

"You've come from the meeting, I suppose?"

"Ay. We didn't go to the service. That worn't in our line. But we heerd the speeches out o' doors."

"The carts were fine!—especially the second one."

"Ay—that's our missis. She and the two girls done the dressin' o' the cart."

"What's her name?"

"Well, her name's Henderson," said the old man, speaking with an amiable, half careless detachment, the manner rather of a philosopher than a gossip.

"She's the farmer's wife?"

"Noa, she ain't. She's the farmer herself—'at's what she is. She's took the farm from Colonel Shepherd—she did—all on her own. To be sure there's Miss Leighton as lives with her. But it do seem to me as Miss Henderson's—as you might say—the top 'un. And me an' James Halsey works for her."

"Miss Henderson? She's not married?"

"Not she!" said old Betts emphatically. "She's like a lot o' women nowadays, I guess. They doan't want to be married."

"Perhaps nobody 'as wanted to marry 'em, dad!" said his elder son, grinning at his own stale jest.

Betts shook a meditative head.

"Noa—yo'll not explain it that way," he said mildly. "Some of 'em's good-looking—Miss Henderson 'ersel', by token. A very 'andsome up-standin' young woman is Miss Henderson."

Delane followed all these remarks with close attention, and continued a rather skilful examination. He learnt that Great End was a farm of about two hundred and fifty acres, that Miss Henderson seemed to have "lots o' money," and had sold her autumn crops very well, that Miss Leighton managed the stock and the dairy with the help of two land-girls, and it was thought by the village that the two ladies "was doin' fine."

Arrived at the village, Betts turned into his cottage, with a nod to his companion, and Delane went on his way.

The lane on the farther side of the village was dark under branching trees. Delane stumbled along it, coughing at intervals, and gripped by the rising chill of the September evening. A little beyond the trees he caught sight of the farm against the hill. Yes, it was lonesome, as the old man said, but a big, substantial-looking place. Rachel's place! And Rachel had "lots o' money"—and as to her health and well-being, why the sight of her on that cart was enough. That vision of her indeed—of the flushed, smiling face under the khaki hat, of the young form in the trim tunic and leggings, and, not least, of the admiring crowd about her, kept returning upon the man's furious sense as something not to be borne, a recurrent blow from which he could not escape.

And that American chap—that Yankee officer who had walked off with her to the church—what was the meaning of that? They were not strangers, that was plain. She had beckoned to him from the cart. The manner of their short conversation, indeed, showed them well acquainted. She told him to go and speak—and he had gone—with alacrity—smiling back at her. Courting, no doubt! Rachel could never let a man alone—or live, without a man after her. A brutal phrase shaped itself—a vile epithet or two—flung into the solitude of the lane.

When he emerged from the trees into a space of greater light between two stubble fields, Delane suddenly drew a letter from his pocket. While Rachel was flaunting with "lots of money"—this was how his affairs were going.

"DEAR ROGER,—I can do nothing for you. Your demands are simply insatiable. If you write me any more begging letters, or if you attempt again to force your way into my house as you did last week, I shall tell the bank to cancel your allowance, and wash my hands of you altogether. My husband's determined to stop this kind of thing. Don't imagine you can either threaten us, or come round us. We have tried again and again to help and reform you. It is no good—and now we give you up. You have worn us out. If you are wise, you will not answer this—and if you keep quiet the allowance shall be continued. MARIANNE TILNEY."

That was a nice letter to get from a man's only sister! Allowance! What was £100 a year to a woman as rich as Marianne? And what was the use of £100 a year to him, with living at the price it was now? His wretched pittance besides, doled out to him by his father's trustees under his father's will, brought his whole income up to £300 a year. How was a man to live on that, and support a woman and child?

And here was Rachel—free—bursting with health—and possessed of "lots of money." She thought, no doubt, that she had done with him—thrust him out of her life altogether. He'd let her see! Whose fault was it that he had taken up with Anita? Nagging, impossible creature!—with her fine ladyisms and her tempers, and her insolent superior ways!

He walked on, consumed with a bitterness which held him like a physical anguish. By now he had reached the farm gate. The sunset had cleared and deepened. Great rosy thunder-clouds topped the down, and strong lights were climbing up the bronzed masses of wood behind the house. No one to be seen. At Millsborough they could hardly be out of church yet. He had time before him. He walked cautiously up the farm-lane, diverging to the left as he reached the buildings so as to escape the notice of any one who might be left in charge. As he slipped under the large cart-shed which backed on the cow-house, he heard somebody whistling inside. It was old Halsey, who had done the afternoon milking in the absence of the girls. Delane could hear the movements of the labourer, and the munching of the cows. A little farther on was the stable, and two horses' heads, looking pensively out from the open half of the door. Delane peered into the stable with the eye of one to whom all farming matters were familiar. Three fine horses—d—-d fine horses!—must have cost £100 a piece at least. No doubt the cows were equally good stuff. And he had noticed under the outer cart-shed a brand-new reaper and binder, and other farm implements and machines of the best quality. Rachel was doing the thing in style.

But where was the farm-house? Then as he crept round the third side of the rough quadrangle, he became aware of a large window with white curtains. Looking through it with his face against the glass, he was startled to find that he was looking straight into the farm-yard through another window of equal size on the other side of the room. And at the moment Halsey came out of the cow-shed carrying a pail of milk in either hand. Delane drew hastily back into the shelter of an old holly that grew against the wall, till the old man had disappeared. Then he eagerly examined the room, which was still suffused by the sunset. Its prettiness and comfort were so many fresh exasperations. He contrasted it inwardly with the wretched lodging from which he had just come. Why, he knew the photographs on the walls—her father, the old parson, and her puritanical mother, whom Rachel had always thrown in his teeth. Her eldest brother, too, who had been drowned at sea. And that engraving—that sentimental thing by Watts, "Love and Death," that Rachel had bought once on a visit to Toronto, and he had scolded her for buying. There it was, as large as life. How did it come there? Was it her property or his? He believed he could claim it, if he chose. Gad!—what would she say if she knew where he was at that moment, and what he was doing!

For eighteen months she had hidden herself so cleverly that he had entirely lost sight of her. When her lawyers communicated with him in the spring they had been careful to give no address. On the whole he had believed her to be still in Canada. She, on the other hand, unless she were a greater fool than he thought her, must have guessed that he would get back to England somehow. Why, the farm had ended in bankruptcy, and what else was there to do but to come home and dun his relations! Yet she had not been afraid to come home herself, and set up in this conspicuous way. She supposed, of course, that she had done with him for good—kicked him off like an old shoe! The rage in his blood set his heart beating to suffocation. Then his cough seized him again. He stifled it as best he could, flattened against the wall, in the shadow of a yew-tree.

The sound, however, was apparently heard, for there were rapid steps across the farm-yard, and a gate opened. "Hallo—who's there?" The voice was, no doubt, that of the labourer he had seen. Delane slipped noiselessly along the wall, and to the back of the stables, till all was quiet again within the farm.

But outside in the road there were persons approaching. He mounted the hill a little way into the shelter of the trees which covered the steep face of the down, and ran up into the great woods along the crest. Through the gathering dusk he saw the large farm-cart clattering up the lane with several figures in it. The cart carried lamps, which sent shafts of light over the stubbles. There was a sound of talk and laughter, and alongside the cart he saw a man leading a motor-bicycle, and apparently talking to the women in the cart. A man in uniform. The American, no doubt!

The cart drew up at the farm-yard gates, and the old labourer came to open them. Everybody dismounted, except one of the girls, who, standing in the wagon, drove the horses. Then, for a time, Delane could see nothing more. The farm quadrangle had absorbed the party. Occasionally a light flashed, or a voice could be heard calling, or laughter came floating up the hill through an open door or window. But in a little while all was silence.

Delane sat down on a fallen trunk, and watched. All kinds of images were rushing through his brain—wide wheat fields with a blazing sun on the stooks—a small frame house set nakedly on the flat prairie with a bit of untidy garden round it—its living room in winter, with a huge fire, and a woman moving about—the creek behind it, and himself taking horses down to water. They were images of something that had once meant happiness and hope—a temporary break or interlude in a dismal tale which had closed upon it before and after.

Darkness came down. The man on the hill said to himself, "Now they are having supper," and he crept down again to the farm, and crouching and wriggling along he made his way again to the big window, over which the curtains had been drawn. There was no one in the sitting-room, however, to judge from the silence, but from the kitchen across the passage came a rush of voices, together with a clatter of plates. The kitchen looked out on the front of the farm, and a wooden shutter had been fastened across the window. But the wood of the shutter was old and full of chinks, and Delane, pressing his face to the window, was able to get just a glimpse of the scene within—Rachel at the head of the table, the man in uniform beside her—three other women. A paraffin lamp threw the shadow of the persons at the table sharply on the white distempered wall. There were flowers on the table, and the meal wore a home-like and tempting air to the crouching spy outside. Rachel smiled incessantly, and it seemed to Delane that the handsome man beside her could not take his eyes from her. Nor could Delane. Her brown head and white throat, her soft, rose-tinted face emerging from the black dress, were youth itself—a vision of youth and lusty-hood brilliantly painted on the white wall.

Delane looked his fill. Then he dropped down the bank on which the farm stood, and avoiding the open track through the fields, he skirted a hedge which led down to the road, and was lost in the shadows of advancing night.