She sat very still, her arms clasped round her knees, her eyes staring into the tremulous life and movement of the field of wheat before her.
"No. As a matter of fact your schoolmaster, Coast, offered to put me up. I only stayed here Saturday night. You passed me, you know, on the bridge when I was talking to some men in the evening. They're not really easy to talk to—can't see beyond the immediate future. That's the worst of working among men without education. You can't have progress without imagination and you can't have imagination without a basis of knowledge. We ought to begin by reforming the schools."
She held her glance tightly on the delicate tendrils of convolvulus encircling the stalks of wheat, on the scarlet pimpernel among the haze of gold and green, on anything but David—David lying among the fragrant grasses, as much at ease as his strenuous vitality would ever let him be.
"Oh, we'll just have to go on doing the best we can—organizing first, educating after. It's the wrong way round of course, but it seems the only way at present. When I was in Cattlesby yesterday——"
"Oh, you were in Cattlesby yesterday?"
So that was why he had not come.
"Yes, I went there directly after breakfast and did not come back till to-day. I'm leaving to-night by the six o'clock train from Hardrascliffe."
"I suppose you had business here to do before you left, otherwise it's surely rather out of your way."
"It is. Horribly." He laughed, at her or at himself. She could not tell. "Six miles out of my way along a dusty disagreeable road, with the Hardrascliffe hills, and the springs broken in the saddle of my bicycle. What do you think of that?"
"That it must have been very important business."