ctor who had been _locum tenens_ here in February, and that they had
seen her in the lanes with the two lads that were being tutored at the
Vicarage. These things had been repeated to her by her grandmother in
order that she might know what disgrace she had brought on her family,
and in the night she had often lain in a sweat of rage, wanting to kill
these liars. But that day, standing in the sunshine, she forgave them.
She was glad that they had such brave yellow sunflowers in their little
wood-fenced gardens: she hoped that all the women would sometimes be as
happy as she was. She did not know that this was no day for her to
venture forth and forgive her enemies, since it was the Lord's Day, when
men ceased to do any manner of work, that they may keep it holy.

The first warning she was given was a sudden impact on a high branch of
an oak-tree a yard or two from where she stood, and the falling to
earth, delayed by the thick crepitant layers of green-gold, sun-soaked
leaves, of a cricket ball. With the perversity of rolling things it
dribbled along the broken ground and dropped at last into a mossy pit
half filled with dead leaves which marked where a gale had once torn up
a young tree by the roots; and the next moment she heard, not distantly,
the open-mouthed howl that comes from a cricket-field in a moment of
crisis. Then she remembered that it was a habit of the young bloods of
Roothing to evade their elders' feeling about Sabbath observance by
going in the afternoon to an overlooked wedge of ground that ran into
the woods and playing some sort of bat-and-ball game. This must be
Sunday. If she did not go home at once she would begin to meet the
village lovers, who would not understand how well she wished them, and
would look at her with the hostility that the lucky feel for the
unlucky. But when she turned to follow the homeward path she heard from
all over the wood scattered shouts. The lads were looking for their
ball. One she could hear, from the breaking down of brushwood, was quite
close to her. Her best plan was to hide. So she stood quite still under
the low branches of an elder-tree, while George Postgate doubled by.

Poor George! He was seventeen, and big for that, but his mind had stayed
at twelve, and he was perpetually being admitted in probation to the
society of lads of his own age, and then for some act of
thick-wittedness being expelled again. It was plain from the way that
his great horny fingers