t her,
and they both fell silent.

Swish-swish! The cutter was coming again. Noel went to the beginning of
her portion of the falling corn, he to the end of it. They worked towards
each other, and met before the cutter was on them a third time.

"Will you come in to supper?"

"I'd love to."

"Then let's go now, please. I don't want to see any more rabbits
killed."

They spoke very little on the way to the bungalow, but she felt his eyes
on her all the time. She left him with George and Gratian who had just
come in, and went up for her bath.

Supper had been laid out in the verandah, and it was nearly dark before
they had finished. In rhyme with the failing of the light Noel became
more and more silent. When they went in, she ran up to her baby. She
did not go down again, but as on the night before her father went away,
stood at her window, leaning out. A dark night, no moon; in the
starlight she could only just see the dim garden, where no goat was
grazing. Now that her first excitement had worn off, this sudden
reappearance of Fort filled her with nervous melancholy: She knew
perfectly well what he had come for, she had always known. She had no
certain knowledge of her own mind; but she knew that all these weeks she
had been between his influence and her father's, listening to them, as it
were, pleading with her. And, curiously, the pleading of each, instead
of drawing her towards the pleader, had seemed dragging her away from
him, driving her into the arms of the other. To the protection of one or
the other she felt she must go; and it humiliated her to think that in
all the world there was no other place for her. The wildness of that one
night in the old Abbey seemed to have power to govern all her life to
come. Why should that one night, that one act, have this uncanny power
to drive her this way or that, to those arms or these? Must she, because
of it, always need protection? Standing there in the dark it was almost
as if they had come up behind her, with their pleadings; and a shiver ran
down her back. She longed to turn on them, and cry out: "Go away; oh; go
away! I don't want either of you; I just want to be left alone!" Then
something, a moth perhaps, touched her neck. She gasped and shook
herself. How silly!

She heard the back door round the corner of the house opening; a man's
low voice down in the dark said:

"Who's the young lady that comes out in the fields?"

Another voice-