North turned on her suddenly, harshly, almost brutally.
“I can’t,” he said hoarsely. “Don’t you see it’s all shapeless, formless, to a mind like mine? I want to believe. God! it would give one an horizon beyond eternity; but you talk of what to me is foolishness.”
He looked at her with an immeasurable dreariness of soul in his eyes, and very gently she put her worn brown hand in his and held it.
“Listen,” she said, and her voice was deep with sudden music. “The children come now. You cannot keep them away. Something draws them to Thorpe. The wild creatures one can understand. It is sanctuary. But the children—it must mean something.”
“You are here.”
She shrank back as if hurt. “No, oh no! It is not me. It is something altogether beyond me. Oh, do listen. They were always slipping in, or standing by the gate with their little faces peeping between the bars. Quite tinies some of them, and I took them back to their homes at first. I thought their mothers would be anxious. And then—then I began to guess. So now I have given them the field beyond the stream and they come out of school hours.”
“The lower field!” exclaimed North. “No wonder you have taken Fothersley’s breath away.”
“Oh, he does not know of that. Fortunately he was here in the morning during school hours, so he only saw the Blackwall children. You see,” she added apologetically, “it is such a child’s field, with the stream and the little wood with blue-bells, and there are cowslips in the spring and nuts in the autumn, and I shall make hay as usual, of course. We cut on Tuesday.”
“Don’t you find them very destructive?”
“They haven’t trampled down a yard of grass,” said Ruth triumphantly. “I gave them a strip by the stream under the silver birches. The primrose bit, you know, and the wood. And the hay is in a way their property. You go and try to walk across it! You’ll have a nest full of jackdaws at you!”