“Noel Fenwick,” said Anne, suddenly remembering.

“What about him?” Queenie’s throat moved as if she swallowed something big and hard.

“Is he there still?”

“He was when I left.”

Her angry, defiant eyes were fixed on the open doorway.  You could see she was waiting for Colin, ready to fall on him and tear him as soon as he came in.

“Am I to see Colin or not?” she said as she rose.

“Have you anything to say to him?”

“Only what I’ve said to you.”

“Then you won’t see him.  In fact I think you’d better not see him at all.”

“You mean he funks it?”

“I funk it for him.  He isn’t well enough to be raged at and threatened with proceedings.  It’ll upset him horribly and I don’t see what good it’ll do you.”

“No more do I. I’m not going to live with him after this.  You can tell him that.  Tell him I don’t want to see him or speak to him again.”

“I see.  You just came down to make a row.”

“You don’t suppose I came down to stay with you two?”

Queenie was so far from coming down to stay that she had taken rooms for the night at the White Hart in Wyck.  Anne drove her there.

ii

Two and a half years passed.  Anne’s work on the farm filled up her days and marked them.  Her times were ploughing time and the time for sowing:  wheat first, and turnips after the wheat, barley after the turnips, sainfoin, grass and clover after the barley.  Oats in the five-acre field this year; in the seven-acre field the next.  Lambing time, calving time, cross-ploughing and harrowing, washing and shearing time, time for hoeing; hay time and harvest.  Then threshing time and ploughing again.

All summer the hard fight against the charlock, year after year the same.  You harrowed it out and ploughed it down and sprayed it with sulphate of copper; you sowed vetches and winter corn to crowd it out; and always it sprang up again, flaring in bright yellow stripes and fans about the hills.  The air was sweet with its smooth, delicious smell.

Always the same clear-cut pattern of the fields; but the colors shifted.  The slender, sharp-pointed triangle that was jade-green last June, this June was yellow-brown.  The square under the dark comb of the plantation that had been yellow-brown was emerald; the wide-open fan beside it that had been emerald was pink.  By August the emerald had turned to red-gold and the jade-green to white.

These changes marked the months and the years, a bright patterned, imperceptibly moving measure, rolling time off across the hills.

Nineteen-sixteen, seventeen.  Nineteen-eighteen and the armistice.  Nineteen-nineteen and the peace.

iii

In the spring of that year Anne and Colin were still together at the Manor Farm.  He was stronger.  But, though he did more and more work every year, he was still unfit to take over the management himself.  Responsibility fretted him and he tired soon.  He could do nothing without Anne.