the
sheepishness of his sex, that youth made a great business of setting off
to the well, his pails slung outwards on a hoop. The rustic comedy
touched a long-atrophied fibre in Blanche. On an impulse of simplicity,
she told herself, "Yes, this is the best thing. I won't go back to town;
I'll live down here, close to the things that matter, and we'll just be
happy." In the rush of warm feeling she turned her eyes on Ishmael, her
love for him expanding because of the love she felt for the unsentient
things about her. His heart leapt to the look.

"Will you come out into the big field after everyone has gone to bed?"
he asked her, busy unfastening a trace; and as she bent over a buckle on
her side of the pony she whispered, "Yes."

She ate her supper in a state almost too placidly joyous for excitement,
and afterwards went up to her room and sat with her elbows on the
window-sill and her chin on her hands, looking out. The corn had been
cut and stacked in great Cornish arishmows, and Blanche, watching the
orange moon swim up, told herself, "When that shadow has reached the
nearest stook I will go." The shadow lay, finger-like, touching the
stook, but still she sat on, reluctant to go out and make sure of her
happiness. The moon, paling to pearl as it rose, shone clearly into the
room, making sharp shadows under the bed-curtains and lying slantwise on
the white counterpane; Blanche rose and slipped off her frock; she moved
as in a dream--her affectations of thought fell away, leaving her
instinctive. She felt as though this lover were her first, and, without
reasoning about it, knew she must be fitly dressed to meet him. She
bathed her face and hands in cold water, then put on a fresh muslin
gown, moving to and fro in full view of anyone who might be in the
sloping field outside. She half hoped, quite innocently, that Ishmael
was there watching; it seemed to her nothing unclean could live in the
white light that permeated the very air of the room. Overcome for a
moment by the strength of her own emotions, she sat on the bed and
buried her face in her hands. As she looked at herself in the glass
before leaving the room she smiled for pleasure that she was unpowdered
and unrouged, not pausing, in her exalted mood, to wonder whether she
would have faced the daylight so. It was a better, an honester,
Blanche, transmuted by happiness, that crept down the stairs, through
the small garden and across the road into the field. He