"You understand, don't you, Rix?" she said, rising.
He nodded, rising also; and they descended the steps together and walked slowly away toward Witch-Hollow.
From the hill-top they noticed one of Sprowl's farm-waggons slowly entering the drive, followed on foot by several men and a little girl. Her blond hair and apron fluttered in the breeze. She was too far away for them to see that she was weeping.
"I wonder what they've got in that waggon?" said Quarren, curiously.
Strelsa's gaze became indifferent, then passed on and rested on the blue range of hills beyond.
"Isn't it wonderful about Chrysos," she said.
"The quaint little thing," he said almost tenderly. "She told Molly what happened—how she sat down under a fence to tie wild strawberries for Sir Charles, and how, all at once, she realised what his going out of her life meant to her—and how the tears choked her to silence until she suddenly found herself in his arms.... Can you see it as it happened, Strelsa?—as pretty a pastoral as ever the older poets—" He broke off abruptly, and she looked up, but he was still smiling as though the scene of another man's happiness, so lightly evoked, were a visualisation of his own. And again her gray eyes grew wistful as though shyly pleading for his indulgence and silently asking his pardon for all that she could never be to him or to any man.
So they came across fields and down through fragrant lanes to Witch-Hollow, where the fat setter gambolled ponderously around them with fat barkings and waggings, and where Molly, sewing on the porch, smoothed the frail and tiny garment over her knee and raised her pretty head to survey them with a smiling intelligence that made Strelsa blush.
"It isn't so!" she found an opportunity to whisper into Molly's ear. "If you look at us that way you'll simply make him miserable and break my heart."
Molly glanced after Quarren who had wandered indoors to find a cigarette in the smoking-room.