In the dusky room the two moved closer together. “Thy danger.” “Thine!” “Ah, our danger!”
“Act, then!” He looked from the window. “Out of gate ere it is quite night!”
They had warm mantles, good shoes. They made a packet of food, took coin from the strong box. Englefield wrote a short letter and placed it where Jankin should find it the first thing coming in, in the morning,—find it, read it and burn it, though there was naught in it that could harm Jankin. Jankin and the boy had had their wage paid that day. Out quietly into the deep twilight, the snow falling.
CHAPTER XXVII
A cot at the side of a wood, and a woodchopper and his sister who gathered faggots. The owner of the wood employing them, a miserly old man in a manor house, kept little company, stirred little abroad, neither hunted nor hawked. They had the still wood, the small cot. Sometimes the steward of the place, sometimes a fellow servant dropped in upon them, but by no means every day. Sound of axe, sound of falling tree, sound of breaking branch and dead leaves underfoot and of March wind. Hours of toil, then the cot, a fire on the hearth and homely fare.
Before he became smith he had been lad of the farm. A cot like this, work like this, was but an old chime chiming again. She had had a hardy, difficult childhood. It rose again upon her at the ruined farm, in Wander forest. Life of the hand, life of the arm and shoulder was not new; it was old.
Life of the passions; that was old.
Life of the awakening mind—life of the slowly kindling soul—life passing away from old life—that had a divine newness.