before her. David Blessing came and leaned
against her. His first intentions were good, he kissed her hurriedly on
the chin, but after that he kissed the sandwich bag.

Sarah Brown wondered whether she could cut her throat with a hoe.

"Suicide while of sound mind," she said. "The said mind being entirely
sick of its unsound body."

If she sat absolutely still and upright the pain was bearable. But even
to think of movement brought tears of pain to her eyes. She detached her
mind from her predicament, and sank into a warm tropical sea of thought.
She was no real thinker, but she thought much about thinking, and was
passionately interested in watching her own mind at work. Thought was
like sleep to her, she sank deeply into it without reaching anything
profound, nothing resulted but useless dreams, and a certain comforting
and defiant intimacy with herself.

She thought of Richard, and wished that she could have hoed a blessing
into every bean of his that she had hoed. She noted half-consciously and
without surprise that the thought of him was beautiful to her. She
could not conjure up his face before her mind, because she always forgot
realities, and only remembered dreams. She could not imagine the sound
of his voice, she could not recall anything that he had said. Yet she
felt again the magic feeling of meeting him, and dreamt of all the
things that might have happened, and that might yet happen, yet never
would happen, between him and her. All the best things that she
remembered had only happened in her dreams, her imagination no sooner
sipped the first sip of an experience than it conjured up for her great
absurd satisfying draughts of nectar, for which the waking Sarah Brown
might thirst in vain. But there was no waking Sarah Brown. Her life was
only a sleep-walking; only very rarely did she awake for a moment and
feel ashamed to see how alert was the world about her.

So she thought of Richard, not of Richard's Richard, but of some pale
private Richard of her own.

The approach of Richard upon a white horse for some time seemed only an
extension of her dream. It was only when she realised that he was riding
up her bean-row, and partially undoing the work of her hoe, that she
awoke suddenly with a start, and caught and tore her breath upon a pin
of pain.

It seemed that the afternoon had now long possessed the fields, it had
wakened into a live and electric blue the Enchanted Forest which she had
last noti