Meantime the vehicle approaching from the opposite direction had also appeared out of a hollow.  It was a high, narrow gig of ancient make, drawn by a horse too low for the shafts and too fat for work.  In the gig sat two people closely pressed together by reason of its narrow dimensions.  The lady wore a black silk dress, of good and indeed costly material, but white with the dust that had settled upon it.  Her hands were covered with black cotton gloves, and she held a black umbrella.  Her face was hidden by a black veil; thin corkscrew curls fringed the back of her head.  She was stout, and sat heavily in the gig.  The man wore a grey suit, too short in the trousers—­at least they appeared so as he sat with his knees wide apart, and the toe of one heavy boot partly projecting at the side of the dash-board.  A much-worn straw hat was drawn over his eyes, and he held a short whip in his red hand.  He did not press his horse, but allowed the lazy animal to go jog-trot at his own pace.  The panels of the gig had lost their original shining polish; the varnish had cracked and worn, till the surface was rough and grey.  The harness was equally bare and worn, the reins mended more than once.  The whole ramshackle concern looked as if it would presently fall to pieces, but the horse was in much too good a condition.

When the four-in-hand had come within about a hundred yards, the farmer pulled his left rein hard, and drew his gig right out of the road on to the sward, and then stopped dead, to give the coach the full use of the way.  As it passed he took off his straw hat, and his wife stooped low as a makeshift for bowing.  An outsider might have thought that the aristocratic coach would have gone by this extremely humble couple without so much as noticing it.  But the gentleman who was driving lifted his hat to the dowdy lady, with a gesture of marked politeness, and a young and elegantly-dressed lady, his sister, nodded and smiled, and waved her hand to her.  After the coach had rolled some fifty yards away, the farmer pulled into the road, and went on through the cloud of dust it had left behind it, with a complacent smile upon his hard and weather-worn features.  ‘A’ be a nice young gentleman, the Honourable be,’ said he presently.  ‘So be Lady Blanche,’ replied his wife, lifting her veil and looking back after the four-in-hand.  ’I’m sure her smile’s that sweet it be a pleasure for to see her.’

Half a mile farther the farmer drew out of the road again, drove close to the hedge, stopped, and stood up to look over.  A strongly-built young man, who had been driving the reaping machine in his shirt-sleeves, alighted from his seat and came across to the hedge.

‘Goes very well to-day,’ he said, meaning that the machine answered.

‘You be got into a good upstanding piece, John,’ replied the old man sharply in his thin jerky voice, which curiously contrasted with his still powerful frame.  ’You take un in there and try un’—­pointing to a piece where the crop had been beaten down by a storm, and where the reapers were at work.  ’You had better put the rattletrap thing away, John, and go in and help they.  Never wasted money in all my life over such a thing as that before.  What be he going to do all the winter?  Bide and rust, I ’spose.  Can you put un to cut off they nettles along the ditch among they stones?’