nt; you don't know how restless. This rain simply makes me
want to die."

2

The weather improved next day, and at the end of that week harvest
began. By what seemed to Noel a stroke of luck the farmer's binder was
broken; he could not get it repaired, and wanted all the human binders
he could get. That first day in the fields blistered her hands, burnt
her face and neck, made every nerve and bone in her body ache; but was
the happiest day she had spent for weeks, the happiest perhaps since
Cyril Morland left her, over a year ago. She had a bath and went to bed
the moment she got in.

Lying there nibbling chocolate and smoking a cigarette, she luxuriated
in the weariness which had stilled her dreadful restlessness. Watching
the smoke of her cigarette curl up against the sunset glow which filled
her window, she mused: If only she could be tired out like this every
day! She would be all right then, would lose the feeling of not knowing
what she wanted, of being in a sort o of large box, with the lid slammed
down, roaming round it like a dazed and homesick bee in an overturned
tumbler; the feeling of being only half alive, of having a wing maimed
so that she could only fly a little way, and must then drop.

She slept like a top that night. But the next day's work was real
torture, and the third not much better. By the end of the week, however,
she was no longer stiff.

Saturday was cloudless; a perfect day. The field she was working in lay
on a slope. It was the last field to be cut, and the best wheat yet,
with a glorious burnt shade in its gold and the ears blunt and full. She
had got used now to the feel of the great sheaves in her arms, and the
binding wisps drawn through her hand till she held them level, below the
ears, ready for the twist. There was no new sensation in it now;
just steady, rather dreamy work, to keep her place in the row, to the
swish-swish of the cutter and the call of the driver to his horses at
the turns; with continual little pauses, to straighten and rest her back
a moment, and shake her head free from the flies, or suck her finger,
sore from the constant pushing of the straw ends under. So the hours
went on, rather hot and wearisome, yet with a feeling of something good
being done, of a job getting surely to its end. And gradually the centre
patch narrowed, and the sun slowly slanted down.

When they stopped for tea, instead of running home as usual, she drank
it cold out of a flask s