much
pains to set going!"

"And YOU shouldn't go worrying me to get to work again in earnest,
Merle. You shouldn't really. One of these days I might discover that
there's no way to be happy in the world but to drag a plough and look
straight ahead and forget that there's anything else in existence. It
may come to that one day--but give me a little breathing-space first,
and you love me. Well, good-bye for a while."

Merle, busying herself again in her pantry, glanced out of the window
and saw him disappear into the stables. At first she had gone with
him when he wandered about like this, touching and feeling all his
possessions. In the cattle-stalls, it might be, stroking and patting,
getting himself covered with hairs, and chattering away in childish
glee. "Look, Merle--this cow is mine, child! Dagros her name is--and
she's mine. We have forty of them--and they're all mine. And that nag
there--what a sight he is! We have eight of them. They're mine. Yours
too, of course. But you don't care a bit about it. You haven't even
hugged any of them yet. But when a man's been as poor as I've been--and
suddenly wakened up one day and found he owned all this--No, wait a
minute, Merle--come and kiss old Brownie." She knew the ritual now--he
could go over it all again and again, and each time with the same happy
wonder. Was it odious of her that she was beginning to find it a little
comic? And how did it come about that often, when she might be filled
with the deepest longing for him, and he burst in upon her boisterously,
hungry for her caresses, she would grow suddenly cold, and put him
aside? What was the matter? Why did she behave like this?

Perhaps it was because he was so much the stronger, so overwhelming in
his effect on her that she had to keep a tight hold on herself to avoid
being swept clean away and losing her identity. At one moment they might
be sitting in the lamplight, chatting easily together, and so near in
heart and mind; and the next it would be over--he would suddenly have
started up and be pacing up and down the room, delivering a sort of
lecture. Merle--isn't it marvellous, the spiritual life of plants? And
then would come a torrent of talk about strange plant-growths in
the north and in the south, plants whose names she had never even
heard--their struggle for existence, their loves and longings, their
heroism in disease, the divine marvel of their death. Their inventions,
their wisdom, aye, their reli