giddy, sick, and faint.

Of a sudden the house they had bought for a whim stood up as she had
never seen it before, low-fronted, broad-winged, ample, prepared by
course of generations for all such things. As it had steadied her when
it lay desolate, so now that it had meaning from their few months of
life within, it soothed and promised good. She went alone and quickly
into the hall, and kissed either door-post, whispering: "Be good to me.
You know! You've never failed in your duty yet."

When the matter was explained to George, he would have sailed at once to
their own land, but this Sophie forbade.

"I don't want science," she said. "I just want to be loved, and there
isn't time for that at home. Besides," she added, looking out of the
window, "it would be desertion."

George was forced to soothe himself with linking Friars Pardon to the
telegraph system of Great Britain by telephone--three-quarters of a
mile of poles, put in by Whybarne and a few friends. One of these was
a foreigner from the next parish. Said he when the line was being run:
"There's an old ellum right in our road. Shall us throw her?"

"Toot Hill parish folk, neither grace nor good luck, God help 'em." Old
Whybarne shouted the local proverb from three poles down the line. "We
ain't goin' to lay any axe-iron to coffin-wood here not till we know
where we are yet awhile. Swing round 'er, swing round!"

To this day, then, that sudden kink in the straight line across the
upper pasture remains a mystery to Sophie and George. Nor can they tell
why Skim Winsh, who came to his cottage under Dutton Shaw most musically
drunk at 10.45 P.M of every Saturday night, as his father had done
before him, sang no more at the bottom of the garden steps, where Sophie
always feared he would break his neck. The path was undoubtedly an
ancient right of way, and at 10.45 P.M. on Saturdays Skim remembered it
was his duty to posterity to keep it open--till Mrs. Cloke spoke to him
once. She spoke likewise to her daughter Mary, sewing maid at Pardons,
and to Mary's best new friend, the five-foot-seven imported London
house-maid, who taught Mary to trim hats, and found the country dullish.

But there was no noise--at no time was there any noise--and when Sophie
walked abroad she met no one in her path unless she had signified a wish
that way. Then they appeared to protest that all was well with them and
their children, their chickens, their roofs, their water-supply, and