That could not alter the doom that I was his, as completely as was the golden-and-white collie that lay there in the field guarding his coat beside the hedge, her nose between her paws and her eyes of love upon her master.
Fate was settled for me. Life without him meant life without love and marriage—in these things I did not wish for any second-best. But he himself had shown me other things in life.
The land! I would stay on the land that had healed me and made a woman of me. It should remain my interest and my delight to make a proper landswoman of myself. The land should be my sweetheart when Dick (who might have been mine) was married to another girl.
Held up, as it were, by this thought, I worked on steadily through the afternoon.
At the break for tea I was so thirsty that I made my way to the little drinking-fountain in the well behind the barn. Into a mossy stone bowl there fell a thread of spring-water cold as ice and clear as diamonds. A bright tin cup was always placed on a slab amidst the ferns of the well.
But when I reached the place I found the German sailor, who had been at the barn, with that cup to his lips. With a little flourish of politeness he put it down, filled it again, rinsed it out, handed it to me.
"No, thank you," I said.
I turned and went back to the harvest-field.
Afterwards I was glad to think that I would not drink after that German, not even from the crystal Welsh spring. I was glad that I had not had a glance for that man who, treated with every kindness by a too-confiding Briton, was at that moment planning to do his worst by his benefactor.
That evening, when Elizabeth and I got into camp, walking rather slowly after an arduous day, we found the news there before us.