Golden Arrow

John Arden's stone cottage stood in the midst of the hill plateau, higher than the streams began, shelterless to the four winds. While washing dishes Deborah could see, through the small, age-misted pane, counties and blue ranges lying beneath the transparent or hazy air in the bright, unfading beauty of inviolate nature. She would gaze out between the low window-frame and the lank geraniums, forgetting the half-dried china, when grey rainstorms raced across from far Cader Idris, ignoring in their majestic progress the humble, variegated plains of grass and grain, breaking like a tide on the unyielding heather and the staunch cottage. Beyond the kitchen and attached to the house was the shippen, made of weather-boarding, each plank overlapping the next. This was lichen-grey, like the house, stone and wood having become worn as the hill-folk themselves, browbeaten and mellowed by the tempestuous years, yet tenacious, defying the storm. Sitting in the kitchen on a winter night, the Ardens could hear the contented rattle of the two cow-chains from the shippen, the gentle coughing and stamping of the folded sheep, while old Rover lay with one ear pricked, and now and then a hill-pony--strayed from the rest--whickered through the howling ferocity of the gale.

But now it was July, and every day when Deborah set her mother's milk-pails upside-down on the garden hedge to sweeten, she stooped and smelt the late-blooming white bush roses. She was gathering them in the honey-coloured light of afternoon, while large black bees droned in the open flowers and hovered inquiringly round the close, shell-tinted buds.

'Deborah!' called Mrs. Arden from the kitchen, 'they're coming. I see them down by the Batch Stone now. Eli's walking as determined-angry as ever. Making up sins for other folks to repent of till he canna see anything in the 'orld.'

'Danged if he inna!' said John, going to the window and breaking into the wholehearted laughter of an old man who has never wilfully done wrong or consciously done right; for he was lifted by his simple love of all creatures as far above right and wrong as his cottage was above the plain. His brown, thin face ran into kindly smiles as easily as a brook runs in its accustomed bed. No one minded him laughing at them when they saw the endless charity of his eyes, which were set in a network of fine lines, and were wistful with his long gazing into oncoming storm and unattainable beauty and the desperate eyes of his strayed and sick sheep.

'Put out a bit of honey, mother!' he called, as his wife set out the old cups and saucers painted with dim and incorrigibly solemn birds, that made the dresser look like an enchanted aviary.

'Oh! John, you spendthrift! And not but a pound or two left of the last taking,' said Mrs.. Arden. 'It's only Eli and Lil, after all. '

'Well, mother,' said John, 'Eli's got no honey in his heart, so he mun have some in his belly, whether or no!'

Deborah had gone out on to the green hill-track, mown by the sheep until no millionaire's lawn could be smoother. Folk to tea was a great event, for here it was only in the summer that the hamlets could link hands over the ridges, the white blossom flow up from the plains till it almost met on the summit, the farmer's wife on one side of the ridge walk over to see her sister on the other side.

'Well, Deborah!' said Eli, as she met them, 'I see you'm going the broad road. Ribbons and fanglements! Aye! The 'ooman of Babylon decked herself for the young captains--'

'I think she looks very nice, father,' said Lily, in the habitually peevish tone of a snubbed child. She took stock of Deborah jealously; detested her for having blue ribbon and a normal father; and put an arm round her waist to disguise the fact and to see if Deborah had made her waist smaller by tight-lacing. Deborah received the embrace with the unquestioning gratitude and ineradicable reserve with which she met all demonstration. Without realizing the fact, she disliked being touched; physical contact with anything larger and less frail than a bee or a raindrop worried her. At night, when she and Joe and the old folk gathered round the fire, she would draw her chair a little apart, unaware that she did so. Warm-hearted and without egoism, she was yet one of the women who are always surrounded by a kind of magic circle. The young men who leant on meadow bridges--locally known as 'gaubies' bridges'--on a Sunday, when she paid a rare visit to the plain, did not call after her; when Joe's friends came in for the evening, she thought they disliked her; she wished she were more like Lily--who boxed their ears and had her feet heavily stamped on under the table and once had an April-Fool postcard with 'I love you' on it.

'I suppose it's because of Lily's golden hair,' she once said to her mother wistfully. Her own was brown as a bark-stack, and had the soft sheen of a wood-lark's wing or a hill-foal's flank.

'No danger!' said her mother tartly. The more she loved people the more tart she was, until her husband used to say ruefully that he wished she was a bit more callous-like to him, for he felt like a pickled damson.

'What's a fellow want with nasty straw-hair for his chillun? You needna "0 mother!" me; folks do have chillun--as I know full well, as have give their first wash to a power of 'em, and the lambs (poor things!)--not as I wash them, being woolly, and I'd as soon bring a lamb into the 'orld as a child, for if they hanna got immortal souls they're more affectionate than most that has--but as I was saying, chillun there are, and married you'll be, and chillun you'll have, and they won't have straw thatch like Lily's, but nice cob-coloured yeads with a polish on 'em! Dear 'eart, she's gone!'

As Deborah came with Eli and Lily along the sward, all the sheep, newly shorn and self-conscious, arranged themselves like a Bible picture, with the three figures as shepherds. The 'cade' lambs, remembering Deborah's punctual feeding, and feeling an aura of protection about her, pressed round.

'Dirty beasts!' said Eli, sweeping them back with his stick. 'Not but what that black 'un will bring a good price come Christmas.'

'Dunna clout 'em, Eli!' came John's voice from the threshold. 'I'd liefer they'd come round me than find the pot of gold under the rainbow. They be my friends, as you know well, and they'm not speechless from emptiness of heart. No, sorrowful and loving they be.'

'Meat, that's what they be,' said Eli.

'Deb!' whispered Lily, 'isn't he an old beast? I hate him more every day, and I wish I could get married--that I do!'

'Oh, Lily!'

'Not that 1 like sheep myself,' Lily continued, 'soft things! But as for him, he's always growling and grudging and taking on religious all at once.' Her lips trembled. 'I hanna got so much as a bit of ribbon, nor nothing,' she said.

Deborah stooped and gathered a red rose--the only one.

'There! that's nicer than ribbon, and Joe likes red,' she said with a smile.

Lily simpered.

'Where be Joe?' she asked negligently, hiding her wearing anxiety as to whether Joe would be present at tea or not.

'Haying at the Shakeshafts', but it's so nigh that he comes back to his tea now and agen.'

Colour came into Lily's pale face. Her eyes shone. She was vital for the first time that afternoon.

'Can I come to your room and do my hair, Deb?' she asked. 'The curls do blow about so. I should think you're glad yours is straight, and never blows out in curls?'

Deborah was looking at a giant shadow--the astral body of the gaunt Diafol ridge, blue-purple as a flower of hound's-tongue--which stretched across the hammock-like valley towards their own range at this time in the afternoon.

'Aye,' she said absently.

'Do you like these sausage-curls at the back, Deb?' asked Lily, thirsting for female praise, since the more nerve-thrilling male was not obtainable.

'Aye,' said Deborah again.

Lily stamped.

'You never looked, Deborah Arden! I suppose you're jealous.'

Deborah awakened from her dreams and smiled.

'I was thinking that shadow was like a finger pointing straight at you and me, Lil,' she said. 'A long finger as you canna get away from. What does it token?'

'Weddings!' said Lily, thinking of Joe and the underclothes she would buy in Silverton, and blushing at an impropriety that Deborah would not have seen.

'Maybe--or maybe summat darker,' said Deborah.

'Oh, don't be so creepy and awful, Deb!' And Lily pulled her blouse tighter to show the outline of her figure better--a very pretty, pigeon-like outline, so poor Joe thought later, desperate at Lily's provocative hauteur.

'Deb!' shrieked Mrs. Arden up the breakneck stairs, 'take the tray and ring up Joe, there's a good girl.'

'Me too!' cried Lily, taking the largest tray.

So out ran the two maidens, their frocks flying, nimble feet scudding over the springy turf, armed with green trays painted with fat roses, beating on them like bacchanals with pokers. They were quite grave and earnest, quite unaware that they were quaint, beautiful, and the inevitable prey of oncoming destiny.

A brown figure appeared far down a cwm of the steep hillside, at first indistinguishable from the blurs that were rocks and sheep, climbing the hot, slippery hill.

Lily watched with veiled eagerness; leaning out to this new force of manhood with no thought of it, but with the complete absorption in her own small, superficial ego in face of great primeval powers which makes a certain type of woman the slave of sex instead of the handmaid of love. She was what is called a good girl, thinking no worse thoughts than the crude ones of most farm women. She was insatiably curious, and was willing to face the usual life of the women among whom she lived in order to unravel the mysteries of the Old Testament and other Sunday meat of the congregation at her place of worship. She was full of tremors and flushes--the livery of passion--yet incapable of understanding passion's warm self. She was ready to give herself as a woman for the sake of various material benefits, with a pathetic ignorance of her own unthinkable worth as a human being. She was rapacious for the small-change of sex, yet she would never be even stirred by the agony of absence from the beloved.

Deborah went indoors like a good sister, and left Joe to his fate.

In the calm, brown kitchen, alive with the ticking of the grandfather clock, Mrs. Arden's alarum and John's turnip watch--which, when wound, went stertorously for an hour and then stopped--the three old folk, like wintered birds, sat round the board in a kind of unconscious thankfulness for mere life and absence of pain. Eli always had the robin cup, the robin being the only bird that did not rouse him to hoarse grumblings about pests and vermin. In the dim past his mother had cajoled and threatened him into a belief that the robin was a sacred bird; so sacred it was. A robin might perch on his spade while he stooped to shake potatoes from the haulm, and he only gave it a crooked smile. Any other bird he would have stoned. They drank from the cups, where the gold was worn at the rim, with a kind of economy of pleasure, as if they felt that the cup of life was slowly emptying, the gold upon it growing faint.

'Honey, Eli?' said John. 'There's a bit of acid in to suit your taste!' By such mild satire he comforted himself for the heart-sickness often given him by Eli's treatment of small creatures.

'Here's our Deb,' he said, with his unfailing delight in his children. 'Where's Lily?'

Mrs. Arden, ever ready to further the designs of nature, kicked him under the table; he gazed at her with steadfast inquiry till the truth slowly dawned on him, and the china rattled to his delighted thump of the table.

'What, Joe?' he asked, and let Eli into the secret in a twinkling.

'Aye,' said Eli, with a kind of sour pride, unable to help approving of success, though disapproving of youth, beauty and love. 'Aye, she'm a terror with the men, is Lilian. The mother was the same.' He always spoke of his late wife in the detached manner of one alluding to a cow.

'Eh, well! The dead say nought,' remarked Mrs. Arden, who always had a veiled hostility to Eli.

'And that's a silence we all come to,' said John pacifically. 'Poor Thomas o' Wood's End's gone, I'm told. You'll be making a noration on his coffin, Eli, I suppose?'

'No. I bain't good enough for them seemingly,' said Eli. 'Some young chap's to come as is new in these parts. Foreman at the Lostwithin Spar Mine. Tongue hung on in the middle. All faith and no works, and the women after 'un like sheep at a gap. I shanna go.'

'I'm going,' said John. 'He was a good neighbour, was Thomas. Stood godfather to our Deb, too, when mother took an' got her named in Slepe Church.'

'Well!' said Mrs. Arden oracularly, 'chapel I was reared and chapel I am. But when it comes to weddings and christenings, you want summat a bit older than chapel--plenty of written words and an all-overish feeling to the place and a good big zinc-lined font. And is the new young man married or single, Eli?'

Eli made no reply--a custom of his when a question bored him, and one so well understood by his intimates that no one dreamt of being offended.

As Deborah sat with the old people, she wondered if the strange experience that had come to Joe and Lily would ever come to her. Would she ever pluck bracken as rosily and earnestly as Lily, waiting for a step--a voice? She felt rather forlorn in the staid environment, rather homesick for adventure, yet with the sense of somnolent peace that broods over afternoon services.

Out in the sun Lily pulled to pieces the small, soft fingers of the bracken with her back to the ascending Joe. A hawk hovered overhead, and the snipe that had been bleating ceased and became still. Up from the meadow Joe had left, came faint shouts; microscopic figures moved there. Joe's black hair was stuck with hay, which gave his steadfast face an absurdly rakish air.

'Waiting for me, Lil?' he asked, his delight overflowing.

'No danger!'

'Oh!' said Joe, crestfallen.

'What are you gallivanting here for, when they're haying?' queried Lily, giving him a chance for a compliment.

'Me tea,' said Joe, truthfully but disastrously.

Lily was silent, surveying his corduroyed and blue-shirted figure with great disfavour.

As he had climbed the slope, there had flickered before him, pale and shaken as the nodding blue heads of the sheep's-bit scabious, a vision of firelight and small faces, with Lily presiding over a giant teapot. For Joe's most spiritual was to some eyes grossly material. His winged desires, his misty gropings after the beautiful were clothed by him in the most concrete images. Therefore, because he loved Lily so much, the teapot of the vision was large enough for a school-treat, larger than any he had seen in the sixpenny bazaar windows last Michaelmas Fair, and the children's faces were quite innumerable. But now, near enough to touch that wonderful blouse of Lily's--a very transparent green butter-muslin made in the latest fashion by Lily and fastened with pins--now the vision went out like a lantern when a blown bough smashes the glass.

'Lil, will you come pleasuring along o' me to the Fair on Lammas holiday?' he asked humbly.

Lily disguised her thrill of joy.

''Fraid I canna,' she said.

'Oh, Lil! And I've saved five shillings on purpose.'

'If so be I came, would you buy me a blue bow?'

'I would that!' said the beaming Joe; 'a whacking big 'un!'

'Oh, not big--little and pretty. I don't like big things.'

'I be a bit on the big side myself, Lil, but it ain't my fault, and I met be able to keep folk from jostling you--being broad like.'

'If I come,' said Lily, 'will you bring Deb too?'

'Deb? Lord o' mercy, I dunna want Deb.'

'It's not proper 'ithout,' said Lil.

Joe flushed redder than he already was. The mere possibility of a state of things that could be construed as improper existing between himself and this mystery--this radiant creature that had suddenly appeared out of the chrysalis of the Lil Huntbatch he had known all his life--went to his head like home-brewed.

'A' right,' he said meekly.

'And as Deb would be dull, when we went off together--'

'Aye,' said Joe with much relish.

'And as she dunna like the chaps about here much--'

'I canna think why--good chaps they be, drawing a straight furrow and handy with the sheep--'

'A girl doesn't think much of that in the man she's going to wed,' said Lily loftily.

'What does she think on? Chapel-going? I'll go to chapel every week, Lil, if you like. I be more of an outside prop than an inside pillar now, but--'

'It doesn't matter to me if you never go,' said Lily. 'But as I said, as she doesn't like them, why not ask that new chap that's come to Lostwithin yonder--a town chap and very smart they say. He's going to speak over Thomas o' Wood's End come Sunday; you could ask him then.'

Joe pondered.

'If I do, will you come to chapel along o' me and walk back arm-in-crook and promise faithful to come to the Fair?'

'If you like.'

'What little small arms you'm got, Lil! And shining white, like a bit of spar. I wish--'

'What?' said Lily, trembling with curiosity and delight.

'Ne'er mind,' said Joe; 'come Sunday night, when we're by the little 'ood and it's quiet, maybe I'll say. And now I'll go round by the back and wash me.'

Lily went into the kitchen, thinking how rough Joe was--better than her father, of course, but probably not as nice as the new Lostwithin foreman, whom she had, with such well-laid plans, arranged to captivate. John glanced up at her and remembered his courting days. Mrs. Arden decided to put off pig-killing till Joe should be 'called,' in order to have black pudding at the wedding. She also considered other abstruse questions. Deborah felt rather like Lily's aunt, and was very motherly to her, retiring soon at an urgent call from Joe to see to the proper adjustment of his best tie--no mere knot, but a matter of intricate folds of crimson silk embellished with large horseshoes. All the things Joe did and possessed were large.

Going to church and chapel in the hills implies much more initiative than it does in the plain, within sound of chiming bells and jangling public opinion. Very early on the hot Sunday of the Oration John was about, milking the cows--Bracken and Wimberry--dressing a sick sheep and placing at the back door his daily votive offering of sticks, water from the cwm and vegetables for his wife's cooking.

'Be you going all in the heat, and it blowing up for tempest, father?' Deborah called from her little window, leaning out in her straight calico nightdress--for no human habitation, not even a bird's nest, commanded her eyrie.

'Aye,' said John; 'poor Thomas canna wait. I mun go or fail him.'

There is a curious half-superstitious, half-mystic sense in the minds of some country-folk that the dead need sympathy--perhaps almost food and drink--more in the days before burial than in their lives.

'Is mother going?' asked Deborah.

'No. She's had a call.'

Every one knew that when Mrs. Arden had a call it meant a small, new force in the world; and all knew the impossibility of gauging its importance, feeling that in her hands might lie the fate of a great man--a member of Parliament, perhaps, or even a vicar. So a call meant a hasty packing of homely simples, linen, and perhaps a posy; then she started on foot, or was driven by John with Whitefoot.

'I'll come then, father, sooner than let you go alone,' said Deborah. She combed and pinned up her wing-like hair and took out her best frock--an old-fashioned purple delaine sprinkled with small pink poppies--and slipped it over her head. She was transformed from a pleasant girl into an arresting woman. The deep colour threw up into her grey eyes shifting violet lights, gave her transparent skin an ethereal look, burnished her hair. Dark colours were to her what rainy weather is to hills, bringing out the latent magic and vitality. This morning her dress might have been cut from the hills, their colours were so alike. Always dignified in the unselfconscious manner of those who live in the wilds, Deborah was even queenly today in her straight, gathered skirt and the bodice crossed on her breast. She put on an apron and ran down.

'Mind you put a bit of mint along of the peas, Deb!' said Mrs. Arden. 'I'll be back when I can.'

Deborah saw her off with due solemnity, in her best bonnet and Paisley shawl--rich with Venetian reds, old gold and lavender. Joe and his bowler had disappeared. Some hours later Deborah and her father set out along the green track over the hill-top, past the little wood of tormented larches and pines that sighed in the stillest weather. Here the hill-ponies gathered in the innermost recesses by the spring that came into the open as a small, vivacious brook. They stamped and whisked at the flies, gazing without interest or fear at the other children of the wild; and John looked at them with the infinite compassion that he felt for all the beautiful, pitiful forms of life.

'What a queer day, father!--as if summat was foreboded,' said Deborah.

'Aye, there's tempest brewing,' John replied meditatively; 'so bright as it is!'

'It's always bright afore storm, father, isn't it?'

'Aye. Why, Deb, how bright and spry you be yourself to-day, dear heart! The young chaps 'll be all of a pother.'

'It's only my old gown.'

'Aye. But you'm like chapel on Christmas night--lit for marvels.'

The tesselated plain, minute in pattern as an old mosaic, seemed on this fervent day to be half-molten, ready to collapse. The stable hills shook in the heat-haze like a drop-scene just lifting upon reality. The ripening oat-fields, the already mellow wheat seemed like frail wafers prepared for some divine bacchanalia. A broad pool far down among black woods looked thick-golden, like metheglin in a small ebony cup.

As they came to the northerly side of the table-land, Caer Caradoc loomed terrific, gashed with shadow, like a wounded giant gathered for a spring. John dreamed upon it all, leaning on his silken-grey staff of mountain ash.

'See you, Deb!' he said in the tranced voice in which he spoke but seldom in a year, at which times his listeners stood silent--at gaze like the sheep before something undiscovered--until he suddenly broke off, turned on his heel, and wheeled manure or dug the garden in silence for the rest of the day. 'See you, Deb! The Flockmaster goes westering; and the brown water and the blue wind above the cloud, and the kestrels and you and me all go after to the shippen with the starry door. Hear you, Deb, what a noise o' little leaves clapping in the Far Coppy! 'Tis he, that shakes the bits of leaves and the bits of worlds, and sends love like forkit lightning--him as the stars fall before like white 'ool at sheep-shearing. And all creatures cry out after him, mournful, like the o'er-driven sheep that was used to go by your grandfather's forge at Caereinion. And he calls 'em--all the white sinners and the stained mighty ones, and even the little blue fishes in the hill streams. "Diadel!" he calls to the hearts of them; and they follow--ne'er a one turns back--going the dark way. But I see far off as it met be yonder where the dark cloud lifts, I see summat as there's no words for, as makes it all worth while. There's a name beyond all names and I'd lief you kept it in mind in the dark days as 'll come on you, Deb! For I see 'em coming like hawks from the rocks. And though you be rent like a struck pine, Deb, my lass, mind you of that name and you shall be safe. Mind you of Cariad--for that's how they name him in the singing Welsh--Cariad, the Flockmaster, the won'erful one!'

He broke off.

'Deb!' he said confusedly, touching her arm like a child; 'I mun bide a bit; I'm all of a tremble and a sweat like a hag-ridden pony.'

Poised between the lowland and the heights and now cut out sharply against the coal-black east, like a hot ember in an oven, stood the red-brick chapel. Whatever beauty flowered within to sweeten the stark ugliness of it--creeping up the walls like swift summer vetches, reaching out determined tendrils towards the illimitable--none was visible without. It stood in a yard of rank grass where Thomas o' Wood's End lay in an open grave of baked earth. It was squat, with round-topped windows too large and too many for it, which caricatured those of Pisa Cathedral. Its paint was of the depressing colour known among house-painters as Pompeian red. The windows had black rep curtains and frosted lower panes to defend the young women in the window pews from the row of eyes that came up above the window-sills at dusk like stars, when the unrighteous outside stood on a ledge and pressed their faces to the glass. So the chapel stood amid the piled and terraced hills like a jibe. Above the door, with a nervous and pardonable shuffling of responsibility (apparently by the architect) were the words, 'This is the Lord's doing.'

Deborah and her father went in, he with the far look still in his eyes and his large hymn-book with the tunes in it under his arm. To him the place was beautiful, painted in the dim, gold-mixed colours of mysterious emotions, half-realized adventures. On the machine-cut patterns of the panes he had gazed while he dwelt upon the burning wheels of Ezekiel's Vision, the Riders of Revelation. The black curtains had made a background for the cumulative tragedy of the Gospel. The jerry-built walls were gracious to him with the promise of many mansions. When they prayed he was always a syllable behind the rest, tasting each word, very emphatic, very anxious not to stress his request for one person more than for another. He sat now with his square, high-crowned old bowler on his knees, his red handkerchief spread on it, and the hymn-book open on the top, reading 'The King of Love my Shepherd is,' and seeing with a vividness denied to the lettered and the leisured those illumined pastures and unwrinkled waters where, simple and wise, the central figure of the fourth Gospel presided.

Deborah looked round surreptitiously and nudged her father.

'There's our Joe! Whatever's come o'er him? Oh, I see! There's Lil too.'

Joe was broadly radiant. In his buttonhole was an enormous passion-flower, presumably bought for the occasion in the Saturday market; Lily had another, which spread its mystic tracery of purple rings, green and gold flames and blue rays on her passionless breast with silent irony until it withered and she threw it on the manure heap. Lily had trimmed her hat with poppies and corn; one bunch had come loose and drooped over her glinting hair--loose also, and tinting her forehead with creamy gold. She always swayed when she sang, and to-day she looked more reed-like than ever. As the flowering rush in the marsh with its brittle beauty cries to be gathered, so she, with her undulating, half-ripe corn and falling poppies, aroused in the back row of youths such untranslatable emotions that they forgot to place the usual pins for the dairymaids from Long Acre Farm.

The first hymn was over, and still the preacher, who was to conduct the service, had not come. Deborah wondered idly what he would be like and whether he would eat jujubes all the time, as the last visiting preacher did--a practice which, while the jujube was new and ungovernable, resulted in a private interview between himself and the Almighty, since no one could hear what he said. She remembered how, in an earnest moment, he swallowed one whole, and how the horrified silence was only broken by the sullen blue-bottles that could not understand the swing panes of the windows. There was silence now, with shuffling and coughs.

At last there came a sound of quick steps; the door flew open and a man entered--so tall that he dominated the place. His ruffled hair was as gold as Lily's; his excited blue eyes, bright colour and radiant bearing were ludicrously unsuited to his black clothes. Out in the early shadows with a fawn-skin slung from one shoulder, and a flute on which to play short, tearless melodies, his vitality would not have seemed so unpardonable. He was up the chapel in three strides, and the service had begun. After a time Deborah found herself kneeling with crimson cheeks, no breath, and the knowledge that she could not look at the preacher.

'What's come o'er me?' she whispered to herself. She secretly mopped her face and the palms of her hands; this was observed by Lily, who knelt very straight and gazed through her fingers at things in general, but chiefly at the apparition who was praying for soberness and pardon in the tones of a lover serenading his mistress. When he began the oration, he spoke of death as a child does--quite unable to believe in his own skeleton, coolly sorry for those who were weak enough to suffer such indignity. He was full of the eloquent comfort of one who has never seen the blank wall that rises between the last tremor and the eternal stillness on the beloved's face. He was so sure of himself, God, and the small shell that was his creed, that Mrs. Thomas--who had felt numb since the hollow on the other side of the bed had been vacant--began to cry. Lily also cried--from excitement, and because Lucy Thruckton would insert her twelve stone of good humour between Lily and the new preacher.

Deborah felt a gathering sense of desolation which, if she bad been able to analyse her emotions, she would have known to arise from a new sense of dependency--a disturbance of poise. Towards the end of the service the growling in the east changed to a roar; rain came like a high tide on the black windows; the young preacher stood in a flicker of lightning as though he were haloed for glory or smitten for doom.

After the service they all crowded into the porch and waited for it to clear.

'Now, Joe!' whispered Lily, 'ask him!'

Joe looked reverently but mistrustfully at this new manifestation.

'Mister!' he began. 'Lily wants to know--' He paused, arrested by the rage in Lily's face. 'Leastways, I want to know if you can come along of us to Lammas Fair and keep our Deb company?'

'The lad's gone kimet!' whispered John to Deborah, who was twisting her fingers in dumb misery. The preacher was surprised: but he was sufficiently educated to take a conscious interest in his new neighbours; and he was town-bred, and very excited about country life.

'I should like to, awfully,' he said, with an enthusiasm little to Joe's taste, 'if you'll introduce me to the lady.'

'Deb!' called Joe across several heads, in the voice with which he 'Yo-ho'd' the cattle; 'this gent's coming along of us to Lammas Fair, so you needna be lonesome.' He felt pleased. The task was over; the walk arm-in-crook was to come. He wiped the perspiration of initiative from his forehead, unaware of a storm worse than the thunder which was to break on him from the united displeasure of Deborah and Lily.

Deborah, so summoned, could do nothing but come forward. With an effort she lifted her eyes to the preacher's and spoke with dry lips the correct formula: 'Pleased to meet you, I'm sure!'

He said nothing, but stood looking down at her with such frank admiration as even a bridegroom in this countryside does not vouchsafe to his bride; and with a light in his eyes that would have been considered 'Most ondecent,' if the onlookers could have found a name for it. As it was, they merely fidgeted, while Deborah and the preacher gazed at one another and were intoxicated with a joy new to her though not unsampled by him.

'A fortnight come Tuesday you be at Lane End at ten sharp,' said Joe, quite carried away by his own savoir faire.

Lily raged inwardly. She was hemmed in by Joe, who could not be made to understand by all her whispers and pinches that he was to introduce her. She trod on his toes with concentrated rage; but his boots were proof against anything lighter than the hoof of a carthorse. She peered round Joe and saw Deborah as none had yet seen her--dissolved in the first tremulous rose-tints of womanhood. She dodged Joe's arm and saw Stephen Southernwood with an expression no woman had yet called up in his face--homage and demand in one. 'Cat!' she whispered, surveying Deborah again. She dug Joe in the ribs with her sharp little elbow.

'Ow!' said Joe.

Meanwhile John surveyed the scene with impartial affection, and the dairymaids murmured seductive 'Don't-ee-nows'! At last the rain ceased as at a signal; steam rose in the sudden yellow light; and they all went home down honeysuckle lanes, across the ridges and round the purple hill-flanks to milk, make love and have their Sunday tea.

Deborah and her father returned through the hill gate, going by tracks that ran above steep cwms where threads of water made a small song and the sheep clung half-way up like white flies; past the high springs where water soaked out among the mimulus to feed the rivers of the plain; up slopes of trackless hills, through wet wimberries; across the great plateaux--purple in the rainy light--that stretched in confused vistas on every side, familiar to John as air to a swallow. They passed the small, white signpost that rose from the midst of the westward table-land, as others rose from various lost points in the vast expanses--shepherds' signposts, pointing vaguely down vague ways, sometimes directing people dispassionately between two paths, as if it mattered little which they chose. This one was called the Flockmaster's signpost, and stood in gallant isolation within a kind of large crater, so that when you had read--'Slepe'--'Wood's End'--and passed on, it immediately disappeared like a ship behind the horizon. At times the sheep crowded round it with stampings and jostling of woolly shoulders; the ponies rubbed against it; cuckoos in the wild game of mating would alight on it with an excited gobble and flash away again. Legend said that somewhere here, long since, the cuckoos met in circle before uttering a note in any field or coppy, to allot the beats for the season. It was told with apologetic laughter by the grandmother of a hill-commoner that on a May night with a low moon you might see from the Little Wood--lone on a ridge--the grey, gleaming ring as from a stone thrown into water. Before the shadows stretched themselves for dawn you might be aware of the clap of wings; might watch the long tails steer to the four winds; might hear from orchards at the valley gates the first warm, linked notes that meant summer.

They walked in silence. John was quite unaware, now that his rare moment of vision had passed, of Deborah's psychic existence. He was subject to the poet's reaction, and he had no idea that anything had occurred except a storm which might damage the wheat. They came to the slopes of short grass from which the round yellow heartsease was disappearing like a currency withdrawn--as the old mintage of painless and rapture-less peace was disappearing from Deborah's being. At the first gate of John's sheepwalk the land slid away suddenly and revealed in terrific masses on the murky west the long, mammoth-like shape of Diafol Mountain.

'There'll be more thunder,' said John; 'it's brewing yonder, it'll be round afore dawn.'

'It's raining over the Devil's Chair now,' 'said Deborah.

On the highest point of the bare, opposite ridge, now curtained in driving storm-cloud, towered in gigantic aloofness a mass of quartzite, blackened and hardened by uncountable ages. In the plain this pile of rock and the rise on which it stood above the rest of the hill-tops would have constituted a hill in itself. The scattered rocks, the ragged holly-brakes on the lower slopes were like small carved lions beside the black marble steps of a stupendous throne. Nothing ever altered its look. Dawn quickened over it in pearl and emerald; summer sent the armies of heather to its very foot; snow rested there as doves nest in cliffs. It remained inviolable, taciturn, evil. It glowered darkly on the dawn; it came through the snow like jagged bones through flesh; before its hardness even the venturesome cranberries were discouraged. For miles around, in the plains, the valleys, the mountain dwellings it was feared. It drew the thunder, people said. Storms broke round it suddenly out of a clear sky; it seemed almost as if it created storm. No one cared to cross the range near it after dark--when the black grouse laughed sardonically and the cry of a passing curlew shivered like broken glass. The sheep that inhabited these hills would, so the shepherds said, cluster suddenly and stampede for no reason, if they had grazed too near it in the night. So the throne stood--black, massive, untenanted, yet with a well-worn air. It had the look of a chair from which the occupant has just risen, to which he will shortly return. It was understood that only when vacant could the throne be seen. Whenever rain or driving sleet or mist made a grey shechinah there people said, 'There's harm brewing.' 'He's in his chair.' Not that they talked of it much; they simply felt it, as sheep feel the coming of snow.

'Aye!' said John, looking across the hammock-like valley; 'there's more to come. We'd best keep the cows in to-night, Deb, safe at whome out of the storm.'

'Aye,' said Deborah heavily, like one recovering from an anaesthetic; 'safe at whome out of the storm!'

Far along the green path they saw the round form of Mrs. Arden bouncing like a ball; and they could hear the faint, tinny clamour of the tea-tray. Away behind them, against the white sky, they saw the loitering figures of Joe and Lily.

'I thought you'd got struck!' shrieked Mrs. Arden as she approached. She had been in the house for half an hour, and loneliness was torture to her, as to all gregarious natures whose way lies in hill-country.

'Both doing well,' she announced triumphantly; 'only most a pity the poor child's the very spit and image of his father! They're saying down at Slepe as the berry-higgler's coming Friday. I thought to go picking to-morrow, Deb, if so be you'll come. There's a power of folk coming, greedy as rooks in the fowl yard. We'd best be early if we want 'em.'

'Why, mother! What a pother you be in!' said John.

'All right, I'll come, mother,' Deborah murmured, cheering up like a wet bee in sunshine under the reassuring influence of the commonplace. This atmosphere Mrs. Arden took with her, as a snail takes its shell; through its homely magic she combated the power of sickness and pain and black terror in many a stuffy little bedroom.

'The kettle's boiling and I've milked,' she announced, 'and all's done, only to scald the tea! And what was the new chap like?'

'No great shakes,' said John.

Deborah went upstairs to take off her best dress.

'What ails our Deb?' Mrs. Arden continued.

'Nought as I know to.'

'What's the chap like to look at?'

'What chap?'

'Why, the preacher! Who else? Don't I know the rest of them back-'erts?'

'Well, he's a likely lad enough.'

'But to look at?'

'Long in the straw,' said John slowly, 'and a yellow head, like a bit of good wheat. And his tongue's hung on in the middle, as Eli said.'

'Oh!' remarked Mrs. Arden comprehensively.

'Where's our Joe?' she added.

John winked.

'Bringing his girl along.'

'Well!' said Patty, 'Lily's a tidy girl enough. I've nought agen her--barring Eli.'

'Talk of the devil!' said a sardonic voice at the door. 'Where's my devoted darter?'

'Coming along, Eli.'

'A good hiding! That's what she wants, to take the Owd 'un out of her. But I'm too kind to her,' said Eli. 'Left the milk in the pails, she did, out in the sun. Never so much as put it in the dairy. Left it to sour.'

'Laws me!' murmured Patty economically.

'Well, well! We're only young once,' said John.

'I'll learn her to be young!' Eli shouted savagely. 'Trapesing along of your Joe and bedizening herself like the whore of Babylon.'

'Now, Eli!'

'And as if that's not enough there's my new shed, as cost me five and thirty shillings, struck!'

'You don't say! Anything killed?'

'There wasn't nothing in it, or there would have been.'

'Well, well! And you one of the saved an' all!' John's voice had a dash of irony in it, although he did not doubt Eli's state of grace.

'It inna me,' said Eli, 'it's the girl. It's a sign from the Lord that she mun be chastened. God's will be done!' he added piously, fixing a scarifying gaze on the truant Lily as she came in.

'What about them six quarts of milk you left to sour?' he asked.

'There, there!' said Mrs. Arden; 'dunna miscall a girl before her chap, Eli.'

Lily, flushed, terrified of Eli's bitter and silent rage, had spirit enough to look at Joe witheringly and remark -

'He's not my chap. He's a great gauby.'

'Laws me!' said John helplessly. 'Mother, I thought you said --?'

'Hush your noise!' snapped Mrs. Arden.

Deborah, softly laying away the gown that had clothed her during an experience for which she found no name, heard angry tones in the usually quiet kitchen, harshness in the Sunday peace.

'Is that you, Lil?' she called.

'Yes. Oh, Deb!' said Lily, coming up, breathless and raging; 'isn't Joe a great gomeril?'

'But whatever put it into his head?' asked Deborah.

'Oh, he asked me to go to Lammas Fair along of him,' Lily explained carelessly, 'and I thought you ought to have a bit of a randy too, so I said to Joe to get the preacher to keep you company.'

'While you went along of Joe?'

'Yes. Well, Joe is a softie! Saying I wanted the chap!'

'Saying I wanted him!' Deborah added, 'and I not so much as set eyes on him.' She found herself crimson.

'How you do feel the heat, Deb!' Lily's voice was rather spiteful. 'Now I never colour up, not if it's ever so. Being slimmer than you, I suppose. But the way he ups and says it! And the girls from Long Acre drinking it all in like brandy-cherries. And that fat Lucy!' Lily began to giggle. 'And Joe so pleased with himself--smiling all o'er! It took me all the way back to learn him what a softie he was.'

'Poor Joe,' said Deborah.

'Lilian,' Eli's voice came raspingly from below. 'What saith the Book of the tiring of hair and putting on of apparel?'

Lily knew what the rasp and the text meant, and she trembled. Any bush in the rain.

'Joe,' she said, running down and smiling on that crushed and sullen youth; 'would you like to come along a bit of the way?'

Joe considered whether Lily with Eli attached was enough to sacrifice his hurt pride for.

'No, I wunna,' he said flatly. He had meant so well! He was quite sure that he had done well. What the tantrum was about he had no idea. Deborah seemed angry with him also, for some of the conversation had floated down. He was obstinately determined to be dignified. It was not surprising that he could not understand what he had done, for his crime in Deborah's eyes was that a strange man had made her feel 'hot all o'er,' and in Lily's that the said stranger had not fallen in love with her.

From the dresser the bird cups presided over the scene, each one a little aslant as it hung by the handle, like a speaker leaning to his audience.

'Well, good night both,' said John, as the ill-matched couple went out; 'and God be with you,' he added, as if he felt a need for some extra blessing.

'And with this house, leastways this small cottage,' said Eli, with the acidity of raw sloes.

'Goodness gracious heart alive!' cried Mrs. Arden, sitting down in a heap on the creaking sofa. 'What's come o'er the folk? Why, you make more ado, every man-jack except father here, of going to meeting for an hour than Jane Cadwallader made of bearing a man child! Dunna fret, Joe! She'll be all right to-morrow-day. And Deb!' she raised her voice and put a twist on it so that it might negotiate the crooked stairs, 'what's come to you comes to all, and if it didna, you'd fret.'

Father and son looked at each other, mystified by the subtleties of femininity.

'Well,' said John, 'I'm going to look the sheep and see what the storm's done for me. Coming, Joe? Coming, Rover?'

They tramped over the wimberries, just losing their first startlingly bright green. John pondered.

'If I was you, Joe lad, I'd go a bit of a walk round Bitterley to-night. I dunna like Eli's look! and she's a little small thing--tongue or no tongue.'

'Oh, aye!' said Joe awkwardly; 'I thought to go. Be that one of the last lot of lambs, dad?'

An hour or two later, having criticized every sheep findable by Rover, they returned. John went in, grateful for the rosy firelight on the tiles, for evenings are chill here even in July. Joe stood lost in thought. Why should he go? Sullenness came over him. But her pretty arms, her little ways, and Eli mad with her--and she had asked him so pleadingly! Yes, he'd go! All in a moment he felt a need of haste, wanted to be there at once. It was a good way to Bitterley--through the Far Leasowes, along Hilltop Road, down Deadman's Lane and over Bitterley Hill. He ran to the stable, bridled Whitefoot, sprang on bareback and was away with a rattle of stones amid a flying crowd of sheep before the rest of the family got to the door. He galloped furiously over the rough tracks with a heavy feeling that he could not understand, a sense that he must hasten more than he had ever done in his life.

Before Eli and Lily had gone many steps from the Ardens', he turned stealthily to see if any one was watching them. Seeing that no one was, he stopped.

'Take them poppies and that good corn out of your hat,' he said.

'Oh, well,' said Lily, with an attempt at lightness, 'they'm dead, anyway.'

She took them out.

'Stamp on 'm,' said Eli.

'But--how soft!' Lily objected.

Eli seized her arm, twisting it slightly, and she trod on the flowers.

'Never no more,' said he. 'Your hat's good enough for such as you with no trimmin'. It did for your mother. And you'm not as good-lookin'. Such a figure of fun as you look--I marvel as Joe 'd think on you, with straws and old dead flowers hanging round you, and your hair all wispy, and a smudge on your nose - '

Lily began to cry.

'And that ondecent bodice!' he went on. 'You'm no better than you should be, showing yourself half naked.'

Lily began to run, stopping her ears. This was worse than any of their homecomings, for her father had never before had a barn struck, and she had never been quite so daring in her attire. Eli's crafty face, with its downward seams from the mouth and nose and the two long, yellow teeth over the lower lip, was dark red with passion. His plain living, his long prayers, his loud confessions of sin, his harsh treatment of himself and his unquestioning meekness to the God he believed in (a vengeful, taloned replica of himself)--all these things had to be paid for by some one. Lily and the creatures at Bitterley Fields paid--Lily with some justice, for she was quite selfish and very irritating, the creatures with none. A few times in the year, when things had gone wrong, the lust of torture came upon Eli, and the contemplation of a deferred and somewhat problematical torment of the wicked (i.e. the not-Eli) in hellfire could not slake it. At these times he exhibited the subtlety of a woman in finding weak points wherein to stick pins--a subtlety inherited by Lily. The ironic remarks of everyday life--the commonplaces of rudeness--gave place to a caustic finesse which burnt like red-hot needles. He was at these times almost an artist, since he was exercising his chief gift; the secondary one of moneymaking was far below in intensity.

So they went, Lily running, sobbing, swaying, Eli following with long strides and uplifted voice.

'When we get whome,' he said with relish, 'there's them six quarts o' sour milk. Waste not, want not! It mun be done summat with. Afore you go to bed to-night, you mun set it for milk cheese. You mun scald the things, stretch the muslin, lade the milk, press it. Afore that fetch the sticks, coals and water, and boil it to scald with.'

'There's no muslin,' said Lily in the midst of sobs, relief in her voice. She was tired out with excitement, and she knew that the work would take hours to do.

'Your good old father's thought of that,' said Eli. 'A father knoweth his own child. There's muslin on your back; when we get in you'll rip it and make the cheeses in that.'

'I won't. So there!' said Lily, for the blouse was her new, radiant, much-laboured-on treasure.

'Woe unto the disobedient children!' Eli intoned. 'I am even as the other Eli. Yea! For I have not corrected you, and the Lord is angry with His servant for these things. You'll take it off now!' He tore at a sleeve.

Lily shrieked, striving to elude him.

'Folk'll see me! Folk'll see me!' she screamed. 'I'll be disgraced.'

'You dunna mind having only a bit of muslin atwixt you and disgrace, so you met as well be without.'

Lily's blouse was in ribbons. Her not very clean calico chemise, fastened with a large safety-pin, and her thin, bare arms were revealed. Part of her hair had fallen loose. They stood beneath a witan-tree on Bitterley Hill; for Lily's running had brought them nearly home. This little ash was the only one that had weathered the northern storms; it was stunted and berryless from excess of cold--like Lily's mind.

'Say you repent!' said Eli, his eyes glittering with a frenzy of half-satisfied passion. Lily leant against the frail tree in utter abandonment.

'I repent,' she said with weak bitterness.

'No. That wunna do. Kneel down and say a prayer.'

Lily did so, repeating a sort of gabbled litany. If any angel or devil peered from the cavernous air upon the pigmy scene surprise must have been his prevailing emotion--surprise at the infinite ingenuity of man, the ephemeral, in finding new methods of torture for his fellows.

'And now,' said Eli, 'you've said a deal about repenting, now come on whome and let's see what you'll do.'

Bitterley Farm was a large, whitewashed huddle of buildings, with patches of damp on the walls. There were no curtains and the upper windows were broken. There was no garden except a potato patch and a few gooseberry bushes. A spring soaked out close to the door and the cattle had trodden it into a slough. The only beauty about the farm was a huge willow, now fleecy with white seed. Its long, slim leaf-shadows wandered up and down the ugly walls untiringly, like the hands of a hypnotist, tracing occult signs unknown to the human intellect--but guessed at by intuition. Even when its golden leaves lay like discarded raiment at its feet and the sky was obliterated with flying clouds it wove thin patterns in the sparse sunshine. It crooned for six months and cried aloud for six, saying always one thing. Perhaps the cuckoo on its top bough knew what it said, and even the hens scratching among its roots. Lily had a vague sense that it meant something, wrote some message on the bleak walls. But Eli knew nothing of it. On moonlit nights it sent a shadow to finger his harsh old face in the cheerless room: but the dream that might have come, tarried, and when he muttered in his sleep it was of vengeance, punishment and such grey negations--never of the beauty that is God. To-night the calves clustered round the door, eager for their evening meal. Inside, Lily nearly fell over the two pails of milk--she was so blinded by tears.

'Bide where you be till I come back,' said Eli. Lily sat down on the floor between the pails, weary and sullen. Eli went out to the barn and fetched the sheep-shears.

'Now, take that bonnet off!' he ordered, returning. Lily did so without comment, half dozing. Eli seized the long golden coils, all in a mass on Lily's shoulders, and before she knew what was happening they lay on the floor by her hat.

'There!' said Eli. 'That's a temptation gone. Now do the cheeses.' He turned on his heel, rather uneasy at the blaze of hatred in her leaden face. He went into the parlour and read the Bible as usual on Sunday nights. He was shaking like a drunkard, and sweating. He read three chapters instead of one, to lull his uneasiness; then he knelt and explained all about it to his God--from his own point of view. Then he fell asleep with his head on the Bible, and was awakened by the sound of his rook-rifle to see Lily--perfectly white, like a corpse--re-loading.

'So you'll shoot me, 'oot, Lilian?' he said calmly.

She made no reply, intent on her work. He sat and watched quizzically. He was not afraid of death. Neither did it occur to him to question it. It was ordained. His God had said it. So be it. He had often shot a dog for not implicitly obeying him. Well, now his master was killing him. He faced Lily calmly. For the first time in his life he felt proud of her. To think of her doing such a thing--that chit of a girl! So they gazed at each other, a kind of madness on both of them. One of the dogs howled and Eli reached for it with his foot under the table and kicked it. The room was very still, like a broken machine. Above the mantelpiece hung, rather crookedly, a painted text--'Fear God.' The horsehair chairs stood inhospitably against the wall. A thick file of accounts hung on a skewer beside a shelf containing The Auctioneer, Old Moore and the Imprecatory Psalms. On the floor, not yet swept up, were the snippings of Lily's green blouse. She was ready. She straightened herself and lifted the rifle to her shoulder. They gazed at each other stonily.

Suddenly there was a clatter of hoofs, a voice shouting 'Yo-ho!' to the calves round the door, and Joe--crimson, breathless, cheery from his mad ride--knocked the mud from his boots and walked into the passage.

'He'll see your chemise,' said Eli indifferently, when he heard Joe first; Lily's eyes flickered. Sex, a surface thing with her, but the strongest influence she knew, awoke again and overcame her madness. She fled through the door into the box-staircase, taking the rifle with her. Eli sat unmoved as he had been throughout. Joe had meanwhile fallen over the milk-pails and was in a sad plight for a knight-errant. He opened the parlour door and came in accompanied by a stream of milk.

'Where's Lil?' he asked.

'You're in my debt for all that good milk,' said Eli. 'Even unto the skirts of his raiment,' he added, with sour amusement.

'Where's Lil?' Joe repeated.

'Tittivating most likely.'

'There's no light upstairs,' said Joe.

Eli was surprised at his acuteness.

'Maybe she's gone to bed,' he amended.

'Well, I want to see her.'

'What for?'

'Mr. Huntbatch! You're her dad, and so I try to be jutiful,' said Joe, with some dignity; 'but when I come to tell her something--I tells her. I don't mouth it to other folk first.'

'What d'you want, then? Me to call her?' Eli began to feel that Providence was not looking after him in its usual efficient way.

'Aye,' said Joe; 'now.'

Eli called up the stairs. There was no reply.

'Lil!' called Joe, and in his rough voice dwelt an amazing tenderness.

There was a movement above, and Lily's voice, striving to be as usual, replied 'Coming.'

In a few minutes she came--tear-stained and limp, without the rifle and in her working dress. At sight of her face Joe opened his mouth to exclaim 'Laws me!' but closed it again sharply, having suddenly grown from a hobbledehoy to manhood. He stood looking from Lily to Eli with bent brows.

Then he turned to Eli and told the only successful lie of his life with the utmost frankness.

'They want to know,' he said, nodding in the direction of High Leasowes, 'if you can spare Lil to go hilling to-morrow. Mother's agreed with the higgler for a big lot and we'm shorthanded. I was to take Lil back to-night if so be she'll come.'

'Oh! you was, was you?' Eli was at a loss for once. He perfectly saw through Joe, and at last began to respect him as almost an equal--though grudgingly. 'Well, o' course, if your mother wants her--when the ladies ask--' he began.

'Lil! Put your hat on and come along of me,' said Joe. 'Your father says so. You mun obey him.' Slow satire pointed the words.

They went out.

'Jump up behind me,' said Joe. 'And, Eli!' he called back, 'there's a bit of plaster gone from the wall just above your chair. I'd see to it if I was you.'

Lily clung to him like a frightened kitten.

'Quiet, now, little lass!' he said. 'I heerd the shot. Which of you was it?'

'Me,' said Lily faintly, and they were silent.

So they came over Bitterley, trotting down the moonlit track through dark cloud-shadows to the Ardens' door. They passed the Batch Stone, a boundary mark intended to be imperishable, but worn down by the rubbing of the cattle against it until the chiselled words were obliterated. So the 'thou shalt nots' of man are erased; only the great affirmatives stand unscarred, and it seems hardly worth while to spend time on negations.

Whitefoot made no sound on the turf. The grouse slept in the deep, arched glooms of the heather forest. From the spinney on the left, just before they came out of Hilltop Road into the western part of the Arden sheepwalk, there smote across them a tide of larch resin and a frothy scent from the elder-trees that stood witchlike round the wood. Out in the Far Leasowes--two large enclosures--there was a new tide of fragrance. It came from the young bracken, wild thyme, burnt grass, heather and cloudberry bushes. With them was the austere fragrance drawn from the rock all day by the sun, and now hanselled delicately by moonlight and dew. The cattle crowded up, snuffing, very much at ease--like all animals and primitive people when nothing intervenes between them and immensity. To the west, immeasurably lofty in the flat moonlight which washed all unevenness from the ridges, stood the Devil's Chair--silvered ebony. From very far off, like the complaint of a denizen of some other world, came the cry of a sheep somewhere in the complex cwms or flats beyond the Little Wood.

As they neared the cottage a stout lamb with a very tightly curled and close-fitting coat caracoled up with heavy mirth and a long-drawn deep bass 'baa!' It looked so absurd, with its middle-aged figure, bulging forehead and awkward babyish-ness, that Joe burst into a guffaw. He never, as a rule, saw either humour or pathos in the things that were his daily life. They were just 'ship,' 'them steers,' 'old Whitefoot.' But tonight he was strung to his highest pitch. His nerves were at last existent; he had attained in minute measure the sad distinction of the poet--who enjoys because he suffers. The lamb grunted and made off at Joe's 'Haw-haw!'

Lily awoke from a half-doze, irritated.

'Whatever be you laughing at, you great gom--' she began. No, she must not call Joe a gomeril. This was a different Joe. She was frightened of him. Also a faint and very unusual sense of gratitude dwelt in her.

The great keen air, like an eagre, not coming in several breezes, but in one soundless and indivisible force, smote on Lily's shorn head.

'Oh, Joe!' she whispered. 'I canna be seen! My hair--'Joe pulled his red handkerchief from his pocket and tied it under her chin.

'Theer! There's not a tidier wench in England,' he said, with an admiration that was balm to her. She closed her eyes. Tears crept slowly down her cheeks.

Inside the house Mrs. Arden awoke.

'Somebody laughed out in the pasture, John,' she said; 'maybe it's the Dark Riders! Put up a prayer.'

'Now, mother! you're too given up to them wold, unrighteous tales.'

'But there is some one. Harkye! They're taboring on the door. Maybe it's a call for me.' She was up and at the window in a moment, flinging on a skirt and shawl.

'Mother!' said Joe's voice, strained yet authoritative; 'come down, 'oot.'

'What's come o'er the lad?'

'Best go down, mother,' said John, beginning to dress; 'and a quiet tongue is the healer.'

Mrs. Arden went down.

'Here's Lil, mother; can she sleep along of our Deb?' asked Joe.

Lily stood at the door, white, with the scarlet handkerchief bound round her small head, her dress only half fastened in her haste. She blinked at the candle in a helpless way, like a young barn-owl.

Mrs. Arden looked over her spectacles first at Lily with solicitude, then at Joe with severe morality, tempered by primitive charity.

'Joe, lad,' she asked, 'is it --? Have you --?'

'No. It inna, and I hanna,' snapped Joe crossly. 'You're allus harping on one string, mother.'

'Well, Joe,' said Mrs. Arden apologetically, 'if a shepherd dunna mind his own sheepwalk, there's none'll mind it for him. But come you in, Lily, my dear.'

She raked the fire and threw dry wood on, then hung the kettle over the blaze. The place was full of resinous fragrance and warm light. Joe surveyed the scene, standing just outside the door with his head bent to look in, his broad shoulders touching the jambs. He felt rather like he did on Fair days, when the long tramp behind the sheep was over, and they given up to their new owner, so that he could go, untrammelled and lonely, about the fair. The pride of responsibility, the stress of a necessary and difficult job were gone. He was just Joe Arden again. He took Whitefoot round to the stable.

'Well, Joe,' said his father, matter-of-factly, 'what about a bit of supper?'

'I dunno as I want any, father.'

Deb appeared on the stairs with the little lamp that always burned by her room at night--lit by her father.

'What's the matter?' she asked.

'Nought,' said Joe. 'Mother'll tell you,' he added, with sublime faith.

Soon there was a comfortable scent of tea. Rover had never known such doings out of lambing time. He was not pleased. The light from the 1s.111/2d. 'alabaster' lamp fell gently on poor Lily, sipping thankfully from the best china. Joe, embarrassed but not apologetic, consumed bread and cheese with the enormous appetite of those that come from spiritual heights. John talked of common things in reassuring tones--not understanding the circumstances, but seeing deeper, into the infinities. Deb, her straight hair falling in sweet disarray over her old shawl, sat protectingly by Lily, and Mrs. Arden, chatty, intent as a field-marshal deploying before battle, poured tea and buttered bread with the thrill of unusual excitement with which she met her many sleepless nights--a thrill which quite made up for her quiet life and her lost rest.

'There, Lil,' she said, 'don't you werret. Deb, you take her up now, and to-morrow we'll go hillin' and Lil'll tell us all about it.'

Her crushed curiosity spoke the 'all' with relish.

Lil looked at Deb's long hair, remembered how she had once despised it, and burst into a storm of sobs.

Joe looked round accusingly.

'Nay, nay,' said John, 'don't take on, little 'un, we'm all friends here.'

'Well, Mr. Arden,' said Lil, gasping, 'and Joe and Mrs. Arden'--(she left Deb out--her hair was so long, so heartbreakingly intact)--'I'm sure I'm very much obliged and--and I'll never forget it. No, I won't that.'

Joe gazed at her over his large cup, with love, the white everlasting that grows in simple places, flowering in his face. He did not know that to such as Lily the snapping of flowers--even everlastings--was a matter of course. They were things to pick, use, fling away: only blossoms, not necessary to anyone, like vegetables and meat. So the gospel of the grey-hearted had sunk into Lily's soul, which was meant to be a thing of colour and fragrance, but had been so frozen and stunted that only a poor little empty crevasse remained.

As the grandfather clock struck five with a chary expenditure of energy, wheezing before each stroke, Mrs. Arden opened the upper flap of the door 'shoo'd' the fowls, and looked to see whether it was the man or the woman who stood outside the ornate cardboard 'weather-house.'

'A caselty day, father!' she called up; 'the 'ooman's out.'

Soon they had breakfast and set out with baskets and large sunbonnets. John had gone with Joe to help in the hay, for it was carrying day and the winrows must all be spread to dry after the storm, then raked afresh.

John's own hay was not yet cut. The little crofts, perched so high in the cold air and the clouds, ripened late.

Sometimes it was September before the hay was safely carried; for it had to be done between storms, and storms were many. John cut it with a scythe. Spare and tall in the clear purple morning he would go up and down with vigorous, rhythmic movements, gravely followed by Rover; and a shadow-man, a shadow-dog went after them, dark and vast on the green field. Then Mrs. Arden and Deborah came and tossed the grass with a merry talking.

On the day when it was ready to be 'lugged' Joe came home early. A twill sheet on two poles, reminiscent of ambulance stretchers, was piled up with hay, and carried by Joe and John as carefully as if it were really an invalid.

But if rain-clouds blew up--as they generally did--the dignified march changed to a mad rush; Rover, protestingly exchanging his stroll for a trot, was half-buried in falling hay; and, as Mrs. Arden said, it was 'one pikel-full for the rick and ten for the mixen, and such a mingicumumbus as never was.' They all regarded 'lugging the hay' as a game of hazard played against the forces of nature, and they played with spirit.

Deborah carried dinner in a basket, and Mrs. Arden brandished the inevitable kettle; for the best picking-ground was a mile away, and they would spend their noon-spell by the Little Wood.

'Real picker's weather it is,' said Mrs. Arden. 'Now we've got a start of the rest, let's see if we can get a tuthree quarts afore we have our vittels.'

She bobbed along rosily and somewhat breathlessly, because she talked incessantly, between the two enigmas who vouchsafed few remarks. Her intuition had partially unravelled both enigmas, and she made the mistake of most people with intuition--she pulled so hard at her thread that she broke it.

'Well, Deb!' she said, after some talk of yesterday's chapel-going; 'I wonder when Mr. Right's coming along for you, and I wonder what he'll be like--light-haired for sure, folks allus like their opposites.'

Deborah had decided during the night that she would be an old maid. To blush as she had done in chapel was, she thought, 'ondecent.' If she blushed like that during a handshake, what would it be in courting? Also with Lily tossing beside her in the narrow bed--her cropped yellow head overwhelmingly reminiscent of another--Deborah was sure she 'couldn't abear' marriage.

'Dear to goodness!' she said to herself 'how girls can go in for it all beats me, so it does.'

She looked down at Mrs. Arden with some dignity and some confusion.

'I'll bide along of you and father and Joe,' she said loftily; 'I dunna like the men.'

'Hoity-toity! But Joe'll not bide with us long. No danger!' Mrs. Arden turned her artillery on to Lily with somewhat obvious mechanism.

'He'll be wanting them fowls' feathers I've saved--plenty of them there are, too, enough to make a nice fat double featherbed.'

Both girls looked haughtily into the distance.

'P'raps he'll marry Lucy Thruckton,' Lily said patronizingly; 'she'd suit him right well, both being rather full in habit.'

'Lily Huntbatch!' Mrs. Arden spoke with asperity, dropping her tact for frank curiosity. 'You'm keeping a very still tongue in your head about your doings last night--a very still tongue, you be!' She waited, but Lily said nothing.

'And it looks queer for a girl to come riding along of our Joe in the black of night with a good whome and a middling good father yonder, and me thinking it was the Dark Riders.'

Silence. Mrs. Arden's charitable feelings had worn a little thin, as such feelings will when the recipient seems not only ungrateful, but unconscious of them. If Lily had thrown herself on Mrs. Arden's mercy last night, and told her that she and Joe had 'gone too far,' Mrs. Arden would have loved her--fought the world for her. But this cold righteousness was irritating.

'It's no good mumchancing like that, Lily!' she continued. 'You may as well out with it soon as late. As for Joe--he'll look higher than Lucy Thruckton, I'se warrant; and maybe higher than some others that'd make pretty bad wives for all their yellow hair--leaving six quarts of milk to go sour!'

At this point Lily's bonnet blew off and she stood revealed. Mrs. Arden gasped. Lily began to cry. Deborah--who had loyally promised not to breathe a word of it--whispered:

'How could it have come about?'

'There, there!' crooned the kind old weather-vane, 'dunna take On! It'll soon grow. But however did you come to do it?'

Lily wailed.

'It won't grow for years and years! I've got to choose between being married looking like a ninepin in a veil, or waiting till I'm even older than Deb.' The taunt was lost on Deborah, because of her last night's resolve; but Mrs. Arden crimsoned with anger.

'You ungrateful chit!' she cried roundly. 'Five and twenty's young enough for anybody--dear me, it is. A woman's bones aren't set proper afore that. It's mean little brats of chillun yours'll be if you wed this side of twenty-five! But you canna,' she added, with a smack of her lips. 'Your hair won't be growed. As you said, you'll look like a ninepin.'

The humour of this suddenly struck her. She doubled into helpless laughter, slapping herself unmercifully as she always did.

'Mother, poor Lil's very miserable; I think you met give her a bit of comfort.'

Deborah was mildly reproving; she felt sorry for Lily. From her aloof height--she was at present icily self-fortified against sex--Lily's obvious sex-enchainment was a most pitiful thing. On account of it she forgave all Lily's little poisoned darts with large tolerance.

'Well, I'm sorry if I was nasty,' said Mrs. Arden huffily. 'But to say such things to Deb--and she Joe's sister! And to be so high and mighty with Joe, and never to give me a word in answer! And you don't know your luck in getting Joe--a good lad as ever stepped. All I can say is, as when your time comes, Lily (as come it will, ninepin or not), and you're crying and sobbing (as you will, for you cry for nought), you'll be glad enough of me then, and of Joe too.'

'I shan't. I shall hate Joe.' Lily was furious. 'But it won't never be,' she added hastily.

'Well, time'll show,' said Mrs. Arden placably, feeling that she had time, nature and Joe on her side. 'And now if we're going to get them old berries, we'd best get 'em.'

They had reached the highest level. The budding heather was round them like a dull crimson sea, encroached upon by patches of vivid wimberries flecked with leaves of ladybird red. In the lustrous air all colours were intensified, and far things came close.

The Devil's Chair loomed over them--for all the distance between--like a fist flourished in the face. It was dark as purple nightshade. The cobalt shadows of clouds swept across the hills in stealthy majesty. From here there was no view of plain or valley, the plateau stretched so far on every side that it shut out everything but the distant hills. A whimbrel cried overhead, shaking its sweet, long-drawn whistle into silver drops, like quicksilver thrown on marble. The ponies drowsed in the swamps. Nothing stirred. They picked for two hours, absorbed and perspiring. Then Mrs. Arden, who had been covertly watching Lily as she ate handful after handful, remarked with caustic humour--'You won't take many berries back for Joe's pie if you pick all the while into Eve's basket!'

The two young women were shocked. Like most country girls they were prudish, somewhat in the manner of mediaeval nuns, with a very clear knowledge of life as it is and a sense that only isolation and extreme care can save them from the mêlée. Mrs. Arden's frequent allusions to her 'stummick' always made Deborah blush. And once at a cattle fair, when her mother had knowingly punched a cow in the ribs and announced with bonhomie to the owner: 'She won't be long!' Deborah had been overwhelmed with shame.

'Well, it must have gone twelve, I want my dinner,' said Mrs. Arden. So they lit the fire and filled the kettle from a wood-spring where rare ferns touched it daintily with supple fingers. They sat down in the short shadow.

'There's Mrs. Hotchkiss coming from Mellicot,' said Mrs. Arden suddenly. 'Laws! Those boys do grow. And there's Mrs. Paifrey. Fancy bringing that mite, Willie! It seems only a day since I was going to and agen with him, and him nigh dead of croup. And there's Lucy Thruckton, coming like a sleepy bumblebee from Wood's End way,' she announced after a period of munching. She sprang up alertly. 'Well! thank God for my good dinner, and I'm not going to let that fat Lucy get all the berries,' she said, 'so I'm off again.'

The two girls stayed in the shade, chatting in a desultory way. The pickers wandered to and fro, lost in distance, appearing out of hollows, passing round the white signpost like dancers in some strange ritual. They stooped for the small, purple fruit, wrapped in purple shadow themselves. Little box-carts, trundled by urchins, began to fill with berries, heaped in miniature replica of the hills. Shadows began to climb from the cwms, and clouds came faster. The signpost--so lonely in its ring of worn turf--looked, with its outspread arms against the dim reaches of heather, like a crucifix under the troubled sky. It stood with forlorn gallantry between the coming storm and its prey. It would be lashed by rain all night; lightning would play round it. The pickers, as with some mysterious sense of kinship, circled about it--so disconsolately consoling it seemed, so like their own destinies. Deborah, looking at it, thought of what her father had said about 'forkit lightning!' She wondered if she would ever be lonesome as it was, set up for a sign, a mark for the storm, pointing vaguely--whither?

Suddenly Mrs. Arden straightened herself, standing at gaze. A stranger was coming over the hill. He stopped by the signpost, seemed to make nothing of it, and came on towards her.

'Can you tell me the way to Lostwithin?' he asked.

'Be you him as preached yesterday?' parried Mrs. Arden.

'Yes.'

She was taking him in. 'A comely chap,' she said mentally. He stood looking down at her amusedly, conscious of his good looks. Even his 'up to date' blue suit did not spoil his supple muscularity, though it was cut absurdly. He was smoking a briar pipe of enormous proportions.

'Quite our Joe's sort!' commented Mrs. Arden.

'Joe's sort' was, of course, young manliness personified, just as 'Deb's sort' was perfect maidenhood, and 'John's sort' something that brought tears to her eyes when she sat and thought her own thoughts in chapel.

'The signpost doesn't say much,' he added.

'Oh, that!' she commented, with much scorn. 'Nobody takes no notice of that. You canna go by signposses here, you mun go the way the hills'll let you. But them posses,' she added, 'they do for the counting councils to be busy about, painting the names and that. Else who knows what they'd be doing?--for a more mischievous set of men there never was! Besides, poor things, they want to seem to be doing something for their money like other folks.'

He laughed.

The two girls by the wood jumped, looked and sat mute, expectant.

'And the way--?' he reminded her.

She had made a resolve.

'Now, it being so hot,' she said persuasively, 'what'd you say to a cup of tea?'

'Well, I'm sure I'm much obliged, but--'

'Come you on,' said she, with authority. 'Come you on and set you down.'

'Well, to goodness!' breathed Deborah. 'Mother's bringing him here.'

Lily skilfully made the most of her front hair under the bonnet. She would see if she couldn't cut Deb out, although her curls were gone.

'Gawls!' shrieked Mrs. Arden, while yet a long way off; 'here's some one as you both knows.'

For the second time Deborah's eyes met those of the stranger.

'Lily,' said Mrs. Arden, 'run and get some sticks while I fetch the water, there's a good girl.'

She hustled Lily into the wood.

'And so I've got my second chance,' said Stephen Southernwood.

Deborah was silent.

'I never saw a soul except you in chapel,' he continued.

Deborah twisted her apron into a rope.

'My name's Stephen; might I ask yours?'

He had more ease of manner than any one she knew, although he had not attained the absence of self-consciousness which the Lord of the Manor down at Slepe had gained (not without tears) at Eton, and which Joe had always possessed as a birth right. At present he was going through a strange experience; he was meeting his primitive self for the first time. It was a very shadowy self so far: but it was something quite different from 'the nice young man' who had caused such a stir among the ladylike drapery assistants in Silverton.

What had caused the change he did not know; was it the bills, the storm, the clear, still face beneath the darkened chapel window? Since yesterday Deborah's face--vital, yet unawakened--had come before him in flashes, vivid and transient. This transience had stirred desire in him; he was ever for the fleeting rainbows of life, and what was denied he must possess. Her evident capacity for large life fascinated him, and the veil of sleep that was upon her fired him to a wakening onslaught like the sun's upon a dim country. Life ceased to appear as a neat, correctly docketed arrangement of a little football, a little Huxley (to improve the mind), a little Sherlock Holmes (relaxation), a little religion (respectability). How it did appear he would have been ashamed to say. The drapery assistants had made him feel smoothly romantic. They themselves were smooth in manner, and they saw to it that in their presence life had no rough edges. The utmost propriety, the utmost glossing of facts was necessary in order to pass muster with them. They were cool, collected, conventional. He suddenly hated them and their smoothness. They had smoothed him also as a rolling-pin smooths dough. They had deferred this curious, electric, mad meeting with himself. He had sampled the pleasure of a kiss fairly often; but his world had been far removed from the forcible kisses of desire, the indecent snatching of the starving for bread, the hot struggle for existence. He had been detached and impersonal about the great facts of life; now they were hot and clamorous in his ears. He looked swiftly at Deborah, and immediately all that he had ever read about the embraces of lovers came into his mind as a poignant, personal matter. She turned her head away, for the look in his eyes was like a strong clasp of her. His thoughts galloped. He dragged at the reins, intuitively feeling such thoughts to be indecent in Deborah's presence: but they were not to be stopped. They rushed on through the whole of human experience; it lay open to him as the countryside below did--vast, delicate, savage. Kissing ceased to be a game. It was a key to intenser life. The act of speech was no longer merely for courtesies, expressions of opinion, pleasantries. It was for demanding joy from the world, surrender from women. The hearthfire, little houses, night, took upon them the magic that they wear for lovers. For the first time in his life he realized Death--the murderer of ecstasy. Rapture, relentlessness, force--these ceased to be words. They were manhood; they were himself. Tears, tenderness, pain--these were woman; these the woman who loved him would be and suffer in the glory of surrender, in the birth-pang. All these things--dim and half understood--flashed through his protesting mind, while Deborah sat, constrained and afraid to look round, gazing into the melting distance. A voice far down in Stephen's being answered the whimbrel that called above. It summoned Deborah peremptorily; it shouted defiance at the hills, the world beyond, the intangible and therefore terrible depths of blue air. Out of the muddle of half-understood ideas, small wishes and conventions that had concealed Stephen Southernwood from himself sprang a creature direct and impulsive as the old gods--who took their way unknown and unhindered, claiming with a nod the love and tears of the witless daughters of men, themselves recking nothing of a love that is pain, only knowing a swift desire, shattering to the desired. So he entered into half his heritage--the physical glory of man. The other half was so far undreamed of.

'Why do you look away all the time?' he asked.

She turned her head with an effort.

'Where d'you live?' was the next question, direct to rudeness. Yet she felt a delicious homage in it.

She nodded sideways.

'Upper Leasurs.'

'Can I come to Upper Leasurs?'

'Aye--no.'

He laughed.

'You funny little girl!'

She had never been called little. She was indignant for a moment. Then she found it sweet. She felt happy and humbleminded as she did when they sang in chapel of sin and forgiveness.

'I tell you what,' said Stephen, 'I shall come to Upper Leasurs and the rest of 'em whether you say I can or not.'

Deborah's apron was a long, creased rag.

'You've not told me your name yet!'

'Deborah.'

'Shall we go for a stroll in all that green and red stuff, Deborah? What's it called?'

'Wimberry wires.'

'When they call us we won't go.'

'Mother'll holla till we do,' said Deborah, matter-of-factly. But she went with him. For the first time in her life the heather was only a carpet, the sky only a roof. She walked between them in a shaken world, to a sound of shaken music. The whimbrel's cry fell there like broken glass; and in her soul the crystal of her pride shivered into fragments. Lily, who had been listening behind a stunted may-tree, stamped with rage, and was what Mrs. Arden called 'almighty imperent!'

'Why should I call them, Lily Huntbatch?'

'It looks bad.'

'Not as bad as you looked, in the dark of night, along of our Joe, with your dress only half done up.'

Lily was silent, but she thought ecstatically how she would try and capture Stephen, throw Joe over and be quits with Mrs. Arden.

'Here they be, friendly as calves o'er a gate,' said Mrs. Arden, forgetting her annoyance.

'He's a deal taller than Joe,' said Lily; 'head and shoulders.'

'That he's not! Joe'd be above his ear. I've notched him and Deb year by year on the door, and I know.'

Lily watched Stephen.

'The chief among ten thousand!' she murmured, with the cheap emotion of her kind--often mistaken for love, altruism, religious fervour.

'You're the chief of all gomerils, Lily!' said Mrs. Arden. Then she surveyed Deborah.

'Took for matrimony,' was her comment.

'I think it's very vulgar,' Lily remarked, 'to talk about marrying and kids all the time like some do. I can't see why a chap can't talk to a girl without such things being thought of.'

'No more do I. Only they dunna, you least of all. And as for vulgar, if such things be vulgar, then you and me and the greatest in the land, aye! even the ministers of God's vulgar--for they're all the signs that such things came to pass. And come to that,' she added, rising to metaphysical heights; 'come to that you'd call the Lord Himself vulgar, you wicked girl! For didn't He plan it all out from the first kiss to the last christening? Answer me that, Lil Huntbatch!'

She gathered breath as Deborah and Stephen came up.

'This is Lily Huntbatch, that's walking out with our Joe,' she announced.

The look Lily gave her was venomous.

'Do you like walking out, Miss Huntbatch?'

'Depends who with.' Her bewildering smile was lost; he was looking at Deborah.

'Your safety-pin's undone, Deb,' she snapped, 'and your belt's crooked.'

'Here's Lucy--after some tea, I suppose,' said Mrs. Arden. 'She's terrible earnest for victuals, Mr. Southernwood, and she does credit to 'em.'

Lucy bore down on them.

'Well, you are hot,' said Lily, welcoming a victim for her anger.

'I be that.'

'And red in the face.'

'I allus am.'

'Your hat's all collywessen.'

'It do get like that.'

'And your brooch is coming off.'

'If I loses 'im, I loses 'im,' said Lucy calmly.

Lily gave it up. If Lucy was too inert to mind about her brooch, given her by her only admirer at the age of twelve, with 'Mizpah' on its moonlike surface, she was invulnerable.

'There, Lucy, my dear, you shall have a nice cup of tea.' Mrs. Arden spoke protectingly.

'Thank you kindly,' Lucy replied, rapaciously and gratefully. 'I'm sure I'm ready for bucketsful, the sweat's poured off me till I feel right thin.'

At this remark Stephen was seized with uncontrollable laughter.

'And he stuffed his handkerchief into his mouth,' Mrs. Arden recounted to John afterwards, 'and he rocks to and agen like me with the colic. I never seed any one laugh like what he did. Eh! I like good laughers. Ill they may do, but they're not bad-hearted--not if they laugh till it hurts 'em. And then Deb started to laugh, and I couldna help but join, and Lil--as had been sitting all the while like an owl with the face-ache--began to say "hee-hee!" very mincing-like, and poor Lucy (never knowing what it was all about) opened her mouth and bellowed, and the old whimbrels set up a din of laughing round about. You never heard such a noise in your life, father! and then all of a sudden the thunder came on and we were all in a pretty taking. And Stephen (he says I'm to call him by his given-name) remembered as he ought to have been at Lostwithin hours ago. He'd stayed the night at Wood's End along of the storm. And he ran one way and we the other, and poor Lucy went lolloping whome, frittened to death. Deborah went awful quiet when it came on to thunder; and she says "Good evening" very stiff to Stephen, as if she'd minded something agen him; and when we were coming back she says, "Mother, there's summat foreboded."

'Aye, she said that yesterday.'

'Well, better go the way of 'ooman, whatsoever's foreboded,' said Mrs. Arden. 'Why, goodness! There's Eli trapesing through all this rain. He's come for Lil, sure to be.'

Eli had passed a very irksome and busy day; for he managed to get a great deal of work out of Lily, feckless as she was. He had been obliged to strain the milk, light the fire and get his own breakfast. He had forgotten to feed the young turkeys, and three of them had passionately and poetically died--to spite him, as he said. The cow Lily always milked had kicked him, objecting to his hard hands. He had cut himself while peeling potatoes. Altogether he emerged from his singlehanded contest with inanimate matter and what he called 'brute beasteses' somewhat battered. Also he had been again troubled with a curious sense of admiration for Lily, realizing that if she had spirit enough to behave as she did last night, she could do most things that she chose.

'She could make a darned sight better butter nor what she does,' he grumbled, 'if she could shoot her feyther.'

He had felt rather startled on coming down in the morning to see the long golden locks on the floor.

'I've bin a fool,' he said. 'When'll she cotch a husband now as she's nothing to take the eye?'

Altogether it appeared to him that it would be a forgiving and dignified thing to go and fetch her back again.

'The prodigal daughter!' he thought, with a wry smile. 'Well, she wunna get much but husks at John's. Poor as a winter feldefar! No yead for business. Keeps that great strapping girl of his eating her head off at whome and doing nought. Work 'em and marry 'em, I says. Keep 'em hard at it and they unna kick.'

He suddenly remembered that Lily had kicked, and was displeased.

'Gerrup!' he shouted at old Speedwell, his brown pony, now sprinkled with white. She moved away slowly, and he threw a stone after her.

'Worth twenty women, that hoss is,' he murmured--apparently to the Almighty, to whom he spoke frequently and familiarly.

'Never say die, her won't.'

He threw another stone. He could not throw at the Almighty or Lily, and he had a need to throw. Yet he was fond of Speedwell in his knotty and sapless way.

He put on his old, round felt hat, very high and pointed in the crown and broad in the brim, and set out. He felt that he was under an obligation to Mrs. Arden for Lily's board and lodging for the night. This hurt his pride. 'And me with all that money!' he said. A present was the thing: but what present? He did not intend to give anything for which he had, or might have, any use, nor anything for which he could possibly get any money. It was very awkward: everything he saw was of use, or might be. The gooseberries were over-ripe; but Lily could make a pie--the Ardens should not have them. There were some chickens with the gapes; but he could, no doubt, cure them. No: he would keep the chickens. But he must take something. He looked round the parlour. His eye fell on the MS. volume of imprecatory psalms--copied out by Lily on Sundays during her childhood under Eli's tight-mouthed supervision. Yes, he would take that. He came out, and tumbled over the prostrate bodies of the three dead turkeys. He would take them too.

'May as well be handsome while you're at it,' he said. 'They can make a pie. It won't be no worse than young rook pie, and that great gawk Joe 'ull be glad of summat to fill his belly.'

So he set out with the psalms under his arm and the turkeys bunched in his hand.

'Summat for you, missis!' he said grandly, as Patty came to the door. 'Take 'em! A free gift they be--free as the Lord's pardon. And I want that darter of mine. The prodigal darter, she is; and her loving father's come all the way to fetch her. Say she's to look sharp.'

It was late, and supper was laid. Joe and his father had just come in, and were washing in the back kitchen. Lily was in Deborah's room, reading an old fashion paper. She sprang up when she heard her father's voice, looking wildly round for a way of escape. Mrs. Arden called her. Lily put on Deborah's sun-bonnet--a blue one that suited her; looked in the glass; decided that she was not attractive enough for her object, and turned in the collar and a little of the front of her dress to show her white throat. Then she very softly climbed out of the low window, and dropped on the turf.

'Joe!' she whispered through the back door, when John had gone to speak to Eli.

'Aye?'

'Don't let him take me, Joe--not to-night!'

'Right you are.'

'And, Joe--'

'Aye?'

'Will you come out along the hill a bit when he's gone?'

'I will that!' said Joe.

'When be she coming?' asked Eli from the door. 'Supper? No. I wunna take any victuals off you, poor things!'

Mrs. Arden sniffed.

'Say she's to come this instant minute,' said Eli.

Joe loomed over him.

'A word with you, Eli,' he said.

'Hark at our Joe calling him Eli!' said Mrs. Arden to Deborah. 'Did you ever hear the like? It's always been "Mr. Huntbatch" afore.'

'What is it now?' asked Eli crustily, moving off with Joe.

'She's not coming to-night.'

'Well, of all the imperence! She's got to come.'

'Not to-night.'

'And what good'll she be in the market when she's bided two nights along of you?' snarled Eli.

Joe's hand was heavy on his collar.

'None of that, Eli!' he said.

'Loose me be! And what'll she please to do after to-night?'

'I dunno.'

'Will she come whome to her loving feyther?'

'I shouldna think so.'

'What, then?'

'Mayhappen she'll marry me--if she'll take me.'

'Oho! And what'll you give me to make up for the loss of my dairymaid?'

'I've nought to give.'

'Oh, yes, you have--you've got bone and muscle, and you can ride. If I give my loving consent to this here 'oly estate, will you give your written word to round up my sheep when I ask you?'

'Maybe that'd be every night,' said Joe dryly.

'Only now and agen,' Eli reassured him; 'and a bit of help at sheep shearing.'

'Well, I dunna mind that; but nought in writing. And I don't know if she'll take me yet.'

'Ho! Listen what I'm going to tell you. She'll drop into yer arms like a blighted apple. Anything to get away from her devoted parent.'

'But all as I do for you is done on one condition,' said Joe; 'you say nought about last night.'

'Well, I dunno as I want to.'

'On your word of honour?' continued Joe. 'No, that's no good--on your credit as a moneyed man.'

'I swear!' said Eli solemnly.

When he had gone Lily crept out of her hiding-place in the wood-house and met Joe on the hill. She had no idea that he was going to ask her to marry him, and so, by the irony of things, she spent more time and energy luring him on than she had ever spent over anything.

'My, Lil! You do look pretty. Why don't you allus turn your dress in?'

Lily smiled.

'What was it you was going to say about my arms on Sunday, Joe?'

'As I wanted to touch 'em.'

'Well--you can.'

Joe's hand went gingerly up and down one arm.

'D'you like me, Joe?'

'Like you? Oh, laws!'

'Well, then, would you like to--put your arm round me?'

'Let's sit down, Lil.' Joe was quite overcome. He had always thought 'askin' to wed' was as difficult as catching sparrows in open weather. And now here was fate playing into his hands. It seemed too good to be true.

'Shall I be on your knee, Joe?' asked Lily confidingly.

Joe had the sensation of home-brewed very strongly. He was conscious that he must not have much more of this heady delight.

'You are big!' Lily's flattery was obvious, but sufficiently subtle for Joe.

'You're a bit of honey, that's what!' said Joe rapturously.

'Like to kiss me, Joe?' There was a short silence.

'You don't like kissing, I can see,' Lily commented disappointedly.

'Not like it?' Joe gasped.

'Well, you kiss as soft as a hen pecking bread.'

'I'll show 'ee if I like it.'

'Oh, dear! You've knocked my bonnet off. My hair!'

'It's all right--all curly like a young lamb, and shining.'

This was sweet to Lily as homage to a king dethroned. She leant back against his shoulder. He kissed her again. They were in the Little Wood. Her eyes sought his bewitchingly as she lay in apparent abandonment to the sweetness of the kiss. She was wondering how many more hints she must give him before he would speak. Joe kissed her throat. Then he put her on the ground roughly.

'We'd best go whome,' he said.

'Why?' She was petulant, not having as yet attained her object.

'I want to do right by you, Lil; and you're so--I canna remember ought when you're like you be to-night.'

'How d'you mean "right" by me?'

Joe took a deep breath.

'I mean will you wed me, Lil, my dear?'

'Well! Why ever couldn't he say that before?' thought Lily. She smiled.

'I might.'

'Soon?'

'Maybe.'

'Come on whome, Lil. The devil's in this little old wood.'

He walked furiously down the track, Lily half running, not understanding the fires she had kindled so carefully.

'When?' asked Joe, slackening speed as they neared home.

'I dunno.'

'Next week?'

'Well -'

'Saturday next as ever is?'

'Oh, Joe!'

'Saturday it is, then! And no more Little Wood till then. For you're like home-brewed, Lil.' He gazed at her in puzzled and admiring wonder.

'And you remember as it means no going back to your feyther if you marry me quick. See?'

Lily did see--had seen all along with a clearness that would have startled Joe.

'There's a cottage at Slepe, not set; I'll take it. We only want a few chairs and a table and a mangle to begin with, and a double bed--' He stopped. 'My tongue's hung on in the middle,' he muttered.

There was a short silence.

'I dunno as it can be Saturday, after all,' said Lily at last.

In Deborah's small, whitewashed room with 'God is Love' over the mantelpiece and a bunch of mimulus in the window, the two girls tossed all night.

'What a craking them two keep up, like calves in a strawy calfskit!' Joe thought. An intolerable sweetness came over him as he let his sleepy thoughts wander on to next Saturday.

'There's surely no harm in thinking of it now, it being all settled up,' he reasoned; 'besides, I mun get used to it, or I'll never remember all the things I've got to remember!'

'Hark at those girls!' said Mrs. Arden to John. 'They're both in love.'

'Or it met be heat lumps,' John suggested. 'Dear sakes, what a man!'

Mrs. Arden would have her romance.

Lily was faced by the necessity of a decision--a thing she hated. There were three ways open to her, and she must traverse one of them, since she could not stay where she was. All were equally detestable to her. She could go home, be a dairy-maid, or become the mother of Joe's children. She writhed at the idea of physical endurance. She did not love, and it is love that makes all pain, all privation, a crown of everlastings. The lover knows that the reward is greater than the hardship. To Lily, who had never cared for any creature, it was not so. She had always supposed that some time she would have children: but now that the vague future had come near it was a different matter. So much for Joe, then. But could she go home? No. The dairymaid's situation remained.

'Not if I know it!' she said. 'Work, work, day in, day out.' She came back to Joe. An idea struck her. With a pathetic mingling of naïveté and selfishness she decided that she and Joe could be 'brother and sister.' As she had not divined anything of Joe's nature or his dreams--for intuitions do not come to the self-centred--this resolve was not so heartless as it seemed.

Having come to a satisfactory decision, Lily curled up to sleep like a kitten.

Deborah half awoke.

'He's coming to High Leasurs,' she thought, 'to see me! Me! Not Lily.' She was astonished at his blindness--Lily was so pretty. She was glad with a boundless joy. Already on the horizon of her life flickered the immortal fires, darting strange rays, changing the world.

'Stephen . . . Stephen Southernwood!' A dart of pride ran through her as she remembered that Lily had not lured his eyes from her once.

'Stephen!' she said aloud, half asleep.

'Keep your silly names to yourself can't you?' grumbled Lily. But Deborah was asleep.

'Stephen,' she murmured again.

'Oh!' cried Lily, much irritated. 'Joe! Joe! Joe! then, if it's got to be said!' She cried from sheer vexation.

'Our Joe's gone off his chump, seemingly!' said Mr. Shakeshaft to John. 'Down at that cottage, day in, day out--missing good wages all for a wench. How bin the mighty fallen!'

'They've kept company a goodish while,' said John, primed by Patty, who did not want it to seem 'a wedding as had to be.' 'It's not a sudden-thought-of thing,' he added anxiously. 'Don't go for to think that.'

'Whoever did think it?' said Mrs. Shakeshaft.

'What's Deb say to it?'

'Oh, Deb!' John smiled broadly. 'Well, Deb, you see--Deb's in--oh, I wunna to say!'

Down at Slepe the small, empty cottage echoed. Joe whitewashed, hammered, forked the garden, brought home a small recalcitrant pig, and finally went to Silverton and bought the furniture with his modest savings. Lily went with him, and they took the road past Bitterley, stopping to interview Eli.

'Well,' said he, 'I give you the blessing of the Lord freely freely. But I've nought else to give. Still, you wunna lack. He feedeth the young ravens that call upon Him. Get out, you fowls!--always running after me for sharps!' Joe hoped that he and Lily would not be kept as short as Eli's fowls. Lily went indoors, and came out with a small parcel--the severed locks.

Mrs. Arden, confronted with a sobbing Lily who could only ejaculate 'Ninepins!'--had set her wits to work, and remembered the ladies' papers in the People's Dining Saloon at Silverton market.

'Why, Lil,' she said, 'it's as clear as cider! You go in along of Joe when he goes after the furniture, and you take in your hair and get a switch made. It's quite the thing. The advertisements say no lady should be without one. Then you just pin it in among them curls, and coil it round, and there you are.'

Lily, having got her parcel, set herself to work on her father's pride, and finally squeezed thirty shillings out of him. Her small, rather forlorn heart was quite lit up by the joy of the shopping in store.

A ready-made white dress, a veil, a piece of artificial orange blossom, cotton gloves and the long-desired set of ribbon-trimmed undergarments--all these were at last stowed away in the trap, while Joe wandered from jeweller's to jeweller's, looking at such a multiplicity of rings that he became hopelessly confused.

'Whoa there, lad!' he apostrophized himself loudly, to the astonishment of the passers-by. 'Where's that little small one that I seed but now?'

Finally they went to choose the furniture in a whirl of haste and embarrassment, while a cool and dispassionate shop assistant yawned and wondered when it would be closing-time. Then they had tea. Joe's 'Tea and ham for two' was full of the tones of love, pride and ecstasy: but Lily was surreptitiously absorbed in her ribbons, and the waitress, like Gallio, 'cared for none of these things.'

The ostler at the 'Drovers' Rest' had a good deal to say as he piled things into the trap and let down the back to accommodate the iron bedstead.

'You're lugging home the furniture and the girl and all, seemingly,' he said, surveying Joe's best cap with a piece of honeysuckle stuck in at the side. 'But I hanna seen the pram yet--no, I hanna.'

His face was convulsed with wrinkles of laughter. Joe looked at Lily out of the corner of his eye as they drove out of the cobbled yard. This was 'Something like!' he felt. Such things were the small change of the marriage festival, and made him realize his fortune.

'Funny chap, eh, Lil?' he ventured.

'I don't like that sort of fun.'

'Of course not,' said Joe, much dashed.

They spoke of where the furniture would stand, and wondered if the weather would 'keep up,' as they jogged home. They went through the great, golden plain of corn, set with jade-green meadows of aftermath, blue-green turnips and the black-green secrecy of woods. They had to pass through four little villages besides Slepe in the long twelve miles of quiet road. At each one, as evening drew on, the young men leaned against a wall or over a bridge, smoking, the day's work done, and setting up a hearty cheer when the trap hove in sight.

'Oh, dear!' said Lily. 'I feel all of a shake, like Quaker's grass.'

'Well,' Joe replied, with what was meant for comfort, 'it's nothing at all to what getting married is. But never you fret, Lil--it'll be o'er, soon or late, and you and me all by our lonesome in that there little place for good and all.'

'Look at them Wyandottes over there!' said Lily hastily. Joe was momentarily interested, and they fell back upon slight things until the long climb from Slepe began. Then Joe said -

'I think you met let me kiss you now.'

'A' right.'

'And I'm going to put my arm round you too, tight. For we'll be man and wife the day after to-morrow.'

They came silently up the steep, half-obliterated track in the heather. Joe was quiet and soberly happy, Lily trepidant, very curious as to the new Joe who was appearing; she kept at arm's length the picture of the future, as conjured by Mrs. Arden's remarks. Mentally slipshod, she had none of the rare, sad, godlike faculty for seeing the end of a thing in its inception. Deborah possessed it in large measure.

The wedding eve came on with unhurrying promptitude, and Joe's last preparations were made before noon. He lit the fire, put the kettle on the pothook and laid the tea with the new china. He surveyed it all with a man's unbounded pride in domestic work, remarking, 'It do look summat odd!' He felt that it was worthy even of Lily. He ate his bread and cheese, washed and waited. Lily was to slip away in the early afternoon and come to see his work. He sat on the doorstep, and the honeysuckle round the porch dropped its limp, spent flowers about him--with the one broad petal lolling back like the tongue of a faery hound in age-long chase of a deathless quarry. The scent was thick in the garden, in the dusty lane, in the house. Joe drowsed and knew that whatever happened to him in the future he would not grumble--not even if he died in the workhouse, for this waiting was sweeter than the honeysuckle. The dense thickets of delight before him--thickets with no notice-board up, to which even the church pointed him on with kindly finger; the little faces (he rose here, and went to look again at the large brown tea-pot, marked 2s. 51/2d. cash); the years to come, with more and more of the tonic sweetness of nature in the little house day by day--all these shone before him in summer colours. He thought of to-morrow, with the gay walk to church, the walk back, the homely tea at Upper Leasowes, the loving comprehension that meant home for him. For it seemed to him that there was nothing about his thoughts unknown to his father; nothing about his hopes and fears with which Deborah did not sympathize; nothing about his bodily welfare that his mother did not forestall. All these emotions were quite dim and unexpressed; but they were none the less real to him. Then he thought how, when the rooks began to go home and the shadows to steal out of the hollows, and the first star sat like a bird on one arm of the Devil's Chair, be would cease to be only 'the lad,' and 'our Joe,' and 'owd Joe of Upper Leasurs.' He would be a woman's all in all, and on his strength of hand and clearness of eye would depend two fates--perhaps many fates. They would walk down the path, 'just ordinary,' they would come to the village, pass beyond it, pass the wicket. He would shut the door.

'Joe Arden,' he apostrophized himself, 'you mun mind to give Lily a cup of tea, and you mun mind to leave her to settle a bit while you go and see to the pig. For even a cat wants to look about a bit in a new whome, and she's got a vast of strangeness afore her.'

He thought of Lily, and as he pondered on how his future peace and his to-morrow's rapture depended solely on her, were bought entirely at her cost, the sharp sweetness of human life--in which pain is the honeysuckle round the door--came over him in a rush.

'Such a little small thing as she be,' he thought. 'I canna make out why she took me. Women be won'erful.'

But, seeing that she had taken him, it never occurred to him to doubt for a second that she would sit down meekly in the shadow of the honeysuckle and be all a wife should.

The gate clicked and she was there. She had never looked so frail, so provocative; she had never been more purposeful or less desirous of admiration. They went in. Lily was genuinely pleased; after the rambling ruin at home, impossible to keep in order even for more industrious hands than hers, the compact, neat little home was delightful. She thought how easy the work would be. She was not meant for the hardy magnificence of manual labour. She should have belonged to the professional or tradesman's class, had a small 'general' to bully, and been able to say with pride to her friends, 'Oh, no, I never do any work, but I know how it should be done.' But here she felt a decided impetus in the direction of domesticity, because for the first time it was picturesque; for the first time she saw herself in a romantic setting of shelves, cupboards, clean paint and flowers. She had a vision of the vicar's wife alluding to her as 'Joe Arden's pretty wife who makes such good jelly.'

'It's real nice, Joe--dear.'

There was quite a little rill of affection in her voice. She had never been loved, and his deep thought for her, so quiet and unceasing, had touched her. It had wakened--as the prince did in the fairy tale--somewhere amid the dragon-like scales of her egotism a very sleepy, very illusive princess, who might, if all went well, sit up and rub her eyes and become a queen.

They looked at the pig, the geraniums, the apple-tree. They had tea for the first time out of the cups that had gold on their rims. It seemed to Joe that a flaming mist hovered in the kitchen. He bethought him of his responsibility as head of the house. He could no longer sit in silence and leave his father to do the honours and 'make things go.' No. The radiant, regrettable fact was that his father would not be here; he must crack the jokes and quote the wise old saws.

'Lil,' he said archly. 'What'll your name be this time tomorrow day?'

'Lilian Arden,' she replied, as sweetly as a small bird chirping.

'What else?'

'Mrs.'

'Aye. That means as I needna be feared of the little old 'ood.'

Lily puzzled over what he meant, till he suggested that they should come and see the rest. Up in the low-ceiled bedroom she understood.

'Oh, Joe! Oh, dear Joe!' she sobbed. 'I canna--I darena.'

'What's come o'er you, Lil? What's frit you?' Joe was quite dazed. Into the sunny room a shade had come, deep as the thunder-cloud shadows on the hills. He sat down gingerly on the bed, patient, mystified.

'I canna tell you--I canna!' said poor Lily. 'And oh! what a dear little room and all--and roses on the jug! Oh, dear--it's cruel hard.'

She ran to the window and knelt by the sill.

'I wish I was Deb,' she wailed. 'Deb's such an every day sort. She never thinks of things like what I do. And so she dunna mind. She said to me on'y to-day as I was a lucky girl--and so I am, only--only--'

'It's all a jumblement to me, what you're saying, Lil--like them anthems when they try who'll sing fastest. You tell me straight out, and it'll be clear as the Christmas star.'

Lily knew it would not. Even her own mind was not clear. Fear struggled there with curiosity, and fatalism brooded over all; she was like a clock without a mainspring, like a road with no signpost. Love would have taken away all need of thought, all curiosity, all fear. Where it led would not have mattered. The ways of lovers are many as the sheep-tracks on the mountains; but they all lead into the shadow-blue distance; into beauty; into rest; into stress and blessed grief and godlike laughter.

'Well?' Joe spoke with benevolent patience and large comfort. His benevolence, which took away the fire from his face for a while and left it as it was when he warmed the half-frozen January lambs, encouraged her.

She rose and came towards him, and for the first time in her life real feeling, not overlaid by any pretence, was in her face. She sank by him on the floor.

'I canna go through,' she sobbed, 'it's--your mother said--about--this time next year.'

Joe understood.

'There, there!' he said, 'don't you werrit, my dear. Things just comes, you know. We'm just got to keep loving and read the Book a bit, and it's all easy.'

'Not for me!' In her voice was the primeval cry of woman when sex comes upon her without the nimbus of love.

'No, I know. And I'm main sorry. And I'll do all I can to be a good chap, Lil. I swear I will. I'll cook for you and wash for you, and I wish I could do all for you; but I canna,' he said sadly.

'Joe!' she trembled. 'Couldn't we be just brother and sister?'

Joe stood up.

'Daze my 'ounds--no!' he shouted.

He knew nothing of other ways of love than his own--he never dreamed that lovers could be at once spiritual, passionate and childless.

'No!' he repeated tensely. 'All or nothing, Lil.'

Lily sobbed.

'Oh! I dunna want to be married and have chillun, and I dunna want to give up this nice little cottage and the veil--and all,' she moaned.

Down below, transfixed with wonder, Mrs. Arden stood with the little last gifts she had brought. She turned and crept out by the back way. They must never know what she had heard.

As she climbed home, like a very stout bluebottle in her print dress, she panted: 'Well, Joe mun find his own road now. Poor Lil--it's bad to be like that, well, well!'

She surveyed the landscape--huge, primeval, towered over by vast, fawn-coloured clouds which, in spite of its hugeness, were much too big for it.

'So long as they're fond on each other,' she murmured, as the swallows darted by with excited little snatches of song, 'nought matters. Not trouble, nor sickness, nor chillun, nor the lack of 'em.'

And with this speech, surprisingly tolerant considering her profession, she nodded at immensity as if she knew a thing or two not altogether to its credit.

Three hours later, out on the hill at the Leasowes, Joe waited for Lily.

'Well,' he asked, 'have you reckoned it all up?'

'I canna reckon anything.'

'Well, what's the word--all or nought?'

'Oh! It canna be nought, Joe.'

'All then?'

'I s'pose so.'

'And the berries are worth the picking?'

There was anxiety in his voice. 'For certain sure?'

'I s'pose so.'

'Come thy way in, then,' shouted Joe uproariously, 'for I want my supper summat cruel, being that uneasy. Mother! Mother! give us a bit of summat to eat, and give Lil a drop of cider. Sit by me, Lil,' he added, holding her hand under the table. 'I'll do my best to suit you, Lil,' he whispered, 'and you shall set the pace.'

Then silence fell between them, while Deborah machined the seams of Mrs. Arden's wedding-dress, and Mrs. Arden explained that it had to be 'loosed out.'

'For I never wore it atween the wedding and the christening,' she explained, 'and so it didna need altering.'

She saw Lily bite her lip.

'Lil, my dear,' she said, filled with a large and beautiful pity, 'I hanna given you much yet, and I was thinking maybe you'd like a tuthree of the bird cups. Now you just take your pick.'

So she gave her treasure without a second thought.

Lily's eyes filled with tears; her tired face lit up. Somehow to-night Mrs. Arden, whom she had never liked very much, was more protecting than Joe. She went to her and leaned on her chair, looking across at Joe's face--still a little stern from the conflict and the possibility of losing her--and a new sense of pride in him sang like a finch in her heart. But to-night Mrs. Arden, with her large charity, asking nothing, giving all; John, with his glance from which the hardness of youth had long passed; and Deborah, with her unruffled virginal absorption in the outside of the ceremony, were more comforting to Lily than all time length and breadth of Joe's love, all the mingled wine of passion. She chose the cups with childish delight, and as Mrs. Arden wrapped each one up, a second spark shone in Lily's heart, and she kissed the old woman of her own accord.

The day had come, clear and multiple-tinted, full of the sound of bees in the heather, and crickets at their endless spinning. Deborah was gathering her three tall lilies in the dew, with the pathetic generosity of sensitive temperaments that deny themselves a cherished beauty for the sake of a recipient who does not even see it.

'Dear Joe!' she thought; 'dear Lil! they'll only be married once; let them have the best of everything.'

Then, in a more mundane mood, she reflected humorously that she would now have her bed and her favourite blue sun-bonnet to herself, and no Lily to dog her footsteps when Stephen came.

She took the lilies upstairs.

'Just right for you, Lil,' she smiled.

'Does my hair look all right?' asked Lily absorbedly.

'Aye. Not a soul would know.'

Joe, on his way downstairs, knocked loudly and asked if he could come in.

'No! No!' they shrieked with much laughter. 'Get off with you!'

'Well, you come out then, Lily, and gie's a look at you. There's some one coming over the hill from Lostwithin way, Deb; best hurry up with your own tittivating.'

Lily came out. If she was never to have another triumph, she had one now. Joe gazed at her with a long, humble, adoring look and said nothing at all. So much can a few shillings do for a woman!

Deborah, fastening her own dress at the back with great difficulty, had the air of a little girl who is showing off a doll, until she suddenly felt in the way and closed her door gently.

The lilies lay caressingly on Lily's arm; her white frock fell softly about her; the veil flowed from her small, corn-coloured head. It was a pity the lilies in her heart had not been tended. She flushed under Joe's look, and her eyes were like chicory-flowers.

'Lil!' said Joe softly, 'be you quite sure about what I asked you?'

Lily pouted.

'I'm not going to be asked questions on my wedding-day,' she said. 'Maybe it won't be for you to say "all or nought," so grand and solemn, Mister Joe! but to take what you can get.' She ran downstairs with a delicious consciousness of power. As she stood in the doorway athirst for admiration, Stephen came up. She gave him a long, slow smile and wished she could change bridegrooms; but his eyes were on Deborah, who came down in her delaine gown.

'For goodness' sake, somebody fasten me! I'm squeedged as a cuckoo in a sparrow's nest!' cried Mrs. Arden from the kitchen.

They started for church in great mirth, after an earnest discussion between Mrs. Arden and Deborah about the oven damper. They were accompanied by all the lambs stout, close-curled, ego-centric--but this escort fell away by twos and threes.

'Our Joe looks grand! Such a man and all, the very moral of his father!' Mrs. Arden whispered to John.

'Now, mother! There's the making of a better man than me in him.'

'And young Stephen?' queried Patty; for in spiritual matters and in the winding of the clock John spoke with supreme authority.

'Well, he's got a goodish way to go; and it's a dark road to the heart of God when you grope by other men's lights; but at long last he'll be a fine chap--if he comes through--a fine chap.'

'I've taken a dislike to the marriage service,' Stephen was saying to Deborah. 'I can't stand being tied to anything, can you?'

'So long as you're tied where you want to be,' said Deborah impersonally, 'I don't see as it matters. You'd stay there anyway.'

'But who knows where he does want to be?' he asked restlessly.

'The wings of a dove,' John murmured; he was watching a pigeon against the dark profun