It was a fairly large house, with a roof still partly thatch, but mostly replaced by slate. In front of it, a trampled yard reached to the low wall of piled boulders and the road. Senath found the mistress of it leaning on the wall, ready to exchange a word with the occupants of the various market-carts as they drove homewards, and the business of the butter was soon transacted. Yet, for some odd reason, Senath was not anxious to take up her basket and go. Perhaps it was that touch of the unusual in the false hint of summer; perhaps, too, her decision to vary the course of her evening walk and the playmates of her imagination; but, whatever it was, she was vaguely aware of a prompting towards human contact. The two women sat on the low wall and chatted in a desultory fashion for a few minutes. Then the farmer's wife, shading her eyes with her hand, looked along the road.
"Your eyes are younger'n mine, Senath Lear," she said. "Tell me, edn that Sam'l Harvey of Upper Farm comen in his trap?"
Senath turned her clear, long-sighted eyes down the road and nodded.
"He'll be driving out Manuel Harvey to the Farm," Mrs. Cotton went on. "You do knaw, or maybe your don't, seein' you live so quiet, that since Sam's been a widow-man, Upper Farm's too big for he to live in in comfort. He's comin' to live in church-town and look after his interests in building. You do knaw that he's putting up a row of cottages to let to they artisesses. And Upper Farm he's let to Manuel Harvey."
"Is he any kin to en?" asked Senath, interested, as any woman would have been, in this budget of news about her old suitor.
"No, less they'm so far removed no one remembers et. There's a power of Harveys in this part of the world. Manuel do come from Truro way."
The high gig had been coming quickly nearer, and now drew up before the two women.
"Evenen, Mis' Cotton. Evenen, Senath," said Sam, with undisturbed phlegm. "Could'ee blige we weth some stout twine? The off-rein has broken and us have only put en together for the moment wi' a bit o' string Mr. Harvey here had in's pocket."
Mrs. Cotton bustled off into the house, and Sam climbed down, the gig bounding upwards when relieved from his weight. He was a big, fair man, his moustache distinctly lighter than his weather-beaten face, and since the days when he had courted Senath the whites of his eyes had become yellowish round the muddy hazel of the iris. Senath looked from him to Manuel, still in the gig, and as she did so, something unknown stirred at her pulses, very faintly.
Manuel Harvey was dark, and though his eyes, too, were hazel, it was that clear green-grey, thickly rimmed with black, that is to be seen in the people of that part of the world who have a strain of Spanish blood in them, dating from the wrecks of the Armada. Those eyes, beneath their straight brows, met Senath's, and in that moment idle curiosity passed into something else.