s a girl; but all the things are new--I got them down from London;
and I had the walls done. So you have a fresh start." She went to the
chintz curtains and pulled them back, disclosing a very large window
that came down to within two feet of the floor and looked on to a
farmyard. "It's a good-sized window, isn't it?" she said. "There's a
story about that. They say my great-grandfather, William Yaverland, was
as mean as he was jealous, and as jealous as he was mean, and in middle
life he was crippled by a kick from a horse and bedridden ever after.
He'd a very pretty young wife, and a handsome overseer who was a very
capable chap and worth hundreds a year to the farm, and it struck him
that in his new state he'd probably not be able to keep the one without
losing the other. So he had this window knocked out so that he could lie
in his bed and keep his eye on the dairy where his wife worked and see
who went in and came out. Well, now it'll let the morning sun in on
you."

She sat down on the windowseat, and with a sense of fulfilment watched
the girl move delightedly among the new things, touching the little
white wreaths on the embroidered bedspread and tracing the delicate
grain with her forefinger, and coming to a stop before the mirror and
looking at her face with a solemn respectful vanity because it had
pleased her beloved. Marion found this very right and fitting, because
to her, in spite of the story of this window, this room had always been
sacred to the spirit of young love. She turned her head and looked out
into the farmyard. When the land had been let out to neighbouring
cultivators the byres and outhouses had all been pulled down, and the
yard was now only a quadrangle of grey trodden earth, having on its
further side a wall-less shed in which there were stacked all the
billets that had been cut from the spinneys on the land they retained,
bound neatly with the black branches fluting together and a fuzz of
purple twigs at each end.

But she could remember another day, more than thirty years before, when
it was brown and oozy underfoot and there was nothing neat about it at
all, and the mellow cry of well-fed cattle came from the dark doors of
tumble-down sheds, and she was standing in the sunshine with two of the
Berkshire piglets in her arms. She had brought them out of the stye to
have a better sight of their pretty twitching noses and their silken
bristles and their playfulness, which was unclouded, as