These accounts of his wanderings through Kent and Sussex give Sheila Kaye-Smith a chance to describe more wonderfully and in greater detail than elsewhere the beauties of the nature that she knows and loves so well. In the end he falls in again with the gipsies, and is enticed by them to wrestle with Hannah, his first love, for her soul. He is at first averse from undertaking it: in the end, of course, he does.
"'Oh, Nannie,'" he said, "'God loves you. He's never stopped loving you once, for all you've turned against Him, and the cruel things you've done——'"
Then he knew that he was merely declaring his own love for her, and calling it God's.... He fell on his knees before her, and taking her in his arms, covered her face with kisses. Her husband immediately appears and threatens to blackmail him: "'This is a fine Gospel, and a damn-fine Gospeller.'" He suggests that five pounds might seal their mouths and then——
"'I call five quid nothing for what you've done,'" said Auntie Lovel. "'The other gentleman had to pay ten, and he scarce got hold of Hannah properly....'"
Robert at last sees the trick and nearly kills Hannah's husband, as a result of which he goes to prison, and Mabel seizes the opportunity to go back to the seaside. When he is released from jail Robert goes to live with Clem, a broken man.
"'Sims to me,'" says Polly, "'as Bob's life's lik' a green apple tree—he's picked his fruit lik' other men, but it's bin hard and sour instead of sweet. Love and religion—they're both sweet things, folks say, but with Bob they've bin as the hard green apples.'"
Robert goes to see Mabel and discovers that she wants to cut him right out of her life, and he decides to kill himself. He goes out in the dead of night to do it ... and finds at last that the love of the soil is too much for him. "The mistrusted earth had been his comfort all through that wonderful year.... Memories came to him of footprints in the white dust of Kentish lanes, of big fields tilted to the sunset, of ponds like moons in the night, of dim shapes of villages in a twilight thickened and yellowed by the chaffy mist of harvest, of the spilt glory of big solemn stars, the mystery and the wonder of sounds at night, sounds of animals creeping, sounds of water, sounds of birds.... The fields and the farms and the sunrise were calling him ... 'I am your God—döan't you know me?... Didn't you know that I've bin with you all the time? That every time you looked out on the fields ... you looked on Me? Why wöan't you look and see how beautiful and homely and faithful and loving I am? I'm plighted to you wud the troth of a mother to her child. You lost Me in the mists of your own mind.' ..."
Once more he is converted. Full of his new Salvation he hastens to enlighten Clem.
"'But now I see as how He's love ... and He's beauty.... He's in the fields mäaking the flowers grow and the birds sing and the ponds have that lovely liddle white flower growing on 'em....'" Again he decides to convert the world despite Clem's protests. "'You can't go every time you're convarted preaching the Gospel about the pläace.'" But he goes ... and Hannah's husband stirs up the roughs to duck him in a mill pond: they are more thorough than they mean to be and he dies of his injuries.
'"I've a feeling as if I go to the Lord God I'll only be going into the middle of all that's alive ... if I'm wud Him I can't never lose the month of May.'"