If that autumn was cruel to Thyrza in its torture of waxing hope it was crueller still to Nell in its torture of hope’s dying. For a week after the harvest she had lived in flowery fields of memory, pied with all bright colours. When she shut her eyes she could see his face bending close to hers over the shocked corn, his thin delicate hands moving among the straw, sliding close enough to hers for an accidental touch ... she could feel them brush her neck as he helped her into his coat at the day’s end of prayer and storm....

For a week her heart drowsed in its own sweetness. Nell was happy, she grew gentler and kinder. She was no longer an ineffective little rebel, full of disgusts and grumbles—a delicious languor was upon her, a bright dimness which veiled all the jags and uglinesses of her life. During this week she did not see Mr. Poullett-Smith, but her mind rested sweetly in his memory. Perhaps the physical fatigue of the harvest, mixed with the natural inertia of her an?mic condition, both had a share in bringing about a certain passivity, or perhaps it was the change of her love from scourge to comfort which put an end to all her old restless efforts to see him, her making of opportunities, her fretting glances from [215] the schoolhouse window, her nervous strayings to church. Anyhow she did not see him till Sunday, when her glorious castle fell.

He came into Sunday-school as usual, with a benedictory smile. Her memories of him in his open shirt, with his face all red and shining and his hair caked with sweat on his forehead, made her feel a little shocked to see him again in his long black cassock, above which his face showed waxy and white. Perhaps a touch of sunburn lingered, but the black of his priestly garment wiped it out. Who would have thought, said Nell to herself, that this day a week ago he had been toiling as a farmhand, with bare arms and throat, all baked and burnt and dirty and sweaty...?

He greeted the superintendent, and talked for a few moments at her desk; then he came down among the teachers and their classes. Nell wore a white blouse and a big white hat like an ox-eyed daisy. Her book slid from her knee to the floor, and there was a scuffle among her children as Freddie Gurr from Hazard’s Green dropped the worm he had been nursing for comfor............