When a whistle blew at five o'clock the hired men on the Quidmore place stopped working. As a son of the house, Tom Quidmore paid to the signal only enough attention to pile his carrots into a wheelbarrow and convey them to the spot where they would help to furnish the market lorry in the morning. In fulfillment of his promise to his adopted mother, he then went in search of Geraldine.
Of all the tasks that he liked at Bere he liked most going to the pasture. It was not his regular work. As regular work it belonged to old Diggory; but old Diggory was as willing to be relieved of it as Mrs. Quidmore of the milking. Brushing himself down, and washing his hands at the tap in the garage after a fashion that didn't clean them, he marched off, whistling. He whistled because his heart was light. His heart was light because his mother having been in the kitchen, he had escaped the necessity for giving her the medicine as to which he felt his odd reluctance.
Leaving the garage behind him, he threaded a tiny path running through the beet-field. The turnip-field came next, after which he entered a strip of fine old timber, coming out from that on the main road to Bere. Along this road, for some five hundred yards, he tramped merrily, kicking up the dust. He liked this road. Not only was it open, free, and straight, but along its old stone walls raspberries and black
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berries grew ripe in a tangle of wild spirea, meadow-rue, jewel weed, and Queen Anne's lace. He loved this luxuriance, this summer sense of abundance. To the boy who had never known anything but poverty, Nature at least, in this lush Connecticut countryside, seemed generous.
The pasture was on the edge of a scrubby woodland in which the twenty acres of the Quidmore property trailed away into the unkempt. Eighty or a hundred years earlier, it had been the center of a farm now cut up into small holdings, chiefly among market gardeners. In the traces of the old farmhouse, the old garden, the old orchard, the boy found his imagination touched by the pathos of a vanished human past.
The land sloped from the hillside, till in the bottom of the hollow it became a little brambly wood such as in England would be called a spinney. Through the spinney trickled a stream which somewhere fell into Horseneck Brook, which somewhere fell into one of those shallow inlets that the Sound thrusts in on the coastline. Halfway between the road and the streamlet, was the old home-place, deserted so long ago that the cellar was choked with blackberry vines, and the brick of the foundation bulging out of plumb. A clump of lilac which had once snuggled lovingly against a south wall was now a big solitary bush. What used to be a bed of pansies had reverted to a scattering of cheery little heartsease faces, brightening the grass. The low-growing, pale-rose mallow of old gardens still kept up its vigor of bloom, throwing out a musky scent. There was something wistful in the
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 spot, especially now that the sun was westering, and the birds skimmed low, making for their nests.
In going for Geraldine Tom always stole a few minutes to linger among these memories of old joys and sorrows, old labors and rewards, of which nothing now remained but these few flowers, a few wind-beaten apple trees, and this dint in the ground which served best as a shelter for chipmunks. It was the part of the property farthest from the house. It was far, too, from any other habitation, securing him the privilege of solitude. The privilege was new to him. At Harfrey he had never known it. About the gardens, even at Bere, there were always the owner, the hired men, the customers, the neighbors who came and went. But in Geraldine's pasture he found only herself, the crows, the robins, the thrushes singing in the spinney, and the small wild life darting from one covert to another, or along the crumbling stone wall hung with its loopings of wild grape.
He was not lonely on these excursions. Companionship had never in the Harfrey schools been such a pleasure that he missed anything in having to do without it. Rather, he enjoyed the freedom to be himself, to wear no mask, to have no part to play. It was only when alone like this that he understood how much of his thought and effort was spent in dancing to other people's tunes. In the Tollivant home he could never, like the other children, speak or act without a second thought. As a State ward it was his duty to commend himself. To commend himself he was obliged to think twice even before venturing on trifles. He had formed a habit of thinking twice, of
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 rarely being spontaneous. By himself in this homey pasture he felt the relief of one who has been balancing on a tight rope at walking on the ground.
When he had climbed the bars Geraldine, who was down the hill and near the spinney, had lifted her head and swung her tail in recognition. Not being impatient, she went on with her browsing, leaving him a few minutes' ............