She nodded a farewell and left him with a strangled “damn” on his lips. He yearned after Thorpe. As a pleasure farm for himself it left little to be desired.
He expressed his feelings to Mrs. Pithey, who, coming along presently in her Rolls-Royce, with the two elder children in their best clothes, picked him out of the dust and took him home to tea.
“Why, it must have been her I passed just now!” she exclaimed. “There now, if I didn’t think it was just a common woman, and never bowed!”
“A good thing too!” said Mr. Pithey majestically. And he said to Mrs. Pithey all the things he would have said to Miss Seer if she had given him a chance.
Undisturbed by the omission, Ruth went home across the flowered fields, but Mr. Pithey himself oppressed her. It seemed grossly unfit, somehow, that the life sacrifice of those dead boys should result in benefit, material benefit at any rate, to the Pitheys of the world; it shocked even one’s sense of decency.
But Bertram Aurelius’s head was very soft against her throat as he dropped into sleep. The sun was very warm, the almond and honey scent of gorse was very sweet. Presently she unruffled, and began to sing the song which seemed to her to belong especially to Thorpe:
“When I have reached my journey’s end
And I am dead and free,
I pray that God will let me go
Along the flowered fields I know