ONE:When the practice was over it was still light, and Robert and Bessie turned inevitably along the little bostal that trickles through the fields towards Ramstile. As usual they did not speak, but in each glowed the thought that they had a full two hours to live through together in the mystery of these sorrowless fields.
FORE:Both unconsciously dreaded the time when they should demand more of each otherwhen the occasional enlacing of their hands would no longer be enough to open Paradise, when from sweet looking and longing they would have to pass into the bitterness of action. Tilly, though essentially practical and determined, was enjoying her first visit to faery, and also inherited her mother's gift of languor. She basked in those hours of sun and bees. She, like her father, was passing for the first time into a life outside the dominion of the farmbut,[Pg 220] whereas he fought it, and sought it only to fight it, she submitted to it as to a caress.
FORE:That year Reuben bought ten more acres of Boarzell, and limed them for oats. He felt that now he had strength to return to his first battle, and wring a grain crop out of that grudging soil. The new piece of ground abutted the Odiam lands on the Flightshot side, and he could see it from his window. Before going to bed at night, he would lean out and feast his eyes on it as it lay there softly covered in the dark, or glimmering in the faint star-dazzle of spring. Sometimes it seemed almost as if a breath came from it, a fragrance of sleep, and he would sit there inhaling it till Naomi peevishly begged him to shut the window and come to bed. Then in the mornings, when he woke according to healthy habit at five, he would sit up, and even from the bed he could see his land, waiting for him in the cold whiteness of dawn, silently calling him out to the freshness of its many dews.
