is friend, natural when you have tramped with a
man for three days, Ashurst's memories and visions that sleepless night
were kindly and wistful and exciting. One vision, specially clear and
unreasonable, for he had not even been conscious of noting it, was the
face of the youth cleaning the gun; its intent, stolid, yet startled
uplook at the kitchen doorway, quickly shifted to the girl carrying the
cider jug. This red, blue-eyed, light-lashed, tow-haired face stuck as
firmly in his memory as the girl's own face, so dewy and simple. But at
last, in the square of darkness through the uncurtained casement, he saw
day coming, and heard one hoarse and sleepy caw. Then followed silence,
dead as ever, till the song of a blackbird, not properly awake,
adventured into the hush. And, from staring at the framed brightening
light, Ashurst fell asleep.

Next day his knee was badly swollen; the walking tour was obviously over.
Garton, due back in London on the morrow, departed at midday with an
ironical smile which left a scar of irritation--healed the moment his
loping figure vanished round the corner of the steep lane. All day
Ashurst rested his knee, in a green-painted wooden chair on the patch of
grass by the yew-tree porch, where the sunlight distilled the scent of
stocks and gillyflowers, and a ghost of scent from the flowering-currant
bushes. Beatifically he smoked, dreamed, watched.

A farm in spring is all birth-young things coming out of bud and shell,
and human beings watching over the process with faint excitement feeding
and tending what has been born. So still the young man sat, that a
mother-goose, with stately cross-footed waddle, brought her six
yellow-necked grey-backed goslings to strop their little beaks against
the grass blades at his feet. Now and again Mrs. Narracombe or the girl
Megan would come and ask if he wanted anything, and he would smile and
say: "Nothing, thanks. It's splendid here." Towards tea-time they came
out together, bearing a long poultice of some dark stuff in a bowl, and
after a long and solemn scrutiny of his swollen knee, bound it on. When
they were gone, he thought of the girl's soft "Oh!"--of her pitying eyes,
and the little wrinkle in her brow. And again he felt that unreasoning
irritation against his departed friend, who had talked such rot about
her. When she brought out his tea, he said:

"How did you like my friend, Megan?"

She forced down her upper lip, as if afraid