She heard the house door open and shut.  The Burtons came down the flagged path between the lavender bushes, leaving them to their peace before milking time.

Looking down she saw John’s eyes blinking up at her through their lashes.  His chest showed a red-brown V in the open neck of his sweater.  He had been quiet a long time.  His voice came up out of his quietness, sudden and queer.

“Keep your head like that one minute—­looking down.  I want your eyelids....  Now I know.”

“What?”

“What you’re like.  You’re like Jeanne d’Arc....  There’s a picture—­the photo of a stone head, I think—­in a helmet, looking down, with big drooped eyelids.  If it isn’t Jeanne it ought to be.  Anyhow it’s you....  That’s what’s been bothering me.  I thought it was just because you had black hair bobbed like a fifteen century page.  But it isn’t that.  It’s her forehead and her blunt nose, and her innocent, heroic chin.  And the thick, beautiful mouth....  And the look—­as if she could see behind her eyelids—­dreadful things going to happen to her.  All the butchery.”

“I don’t see any dreadful things going to happen to me.”

“No.  Her sight was second sight; and your sight is memory.  You never forget things....  I shall call you Jeanne.  You ought to wear armour and a helmet.”  His voice ceased and began again.  “What are you thinking of?”

“I don’t know.  I don’t think much, ever.”

She was wondering what he would think if he knew.

She wondered what the farm would be like without him.  Would it be what it was last autumn and winter and in the spring before he came?  But she had been happy all that time without him, even in the hard, frost-biting winter.  When you had gone through that you knew the worst of Barrow Farm.  It made your face coarse, though.

Joan of Arc was a peasant.  No wonder she was beginning to look like her.  If John went—­

“John, shall you stay on here?”

“I don’t know.  I shall stick to farming if that’s what you mean.  Though it isn’t what I wanted.”

“What did you want?”

“To go into the Army.”

“Why didn’t you then?”

“They wouldn’t have me.  There’s something wrong with my eyes....  So the land’s got me instead.”

“Me too.  We ought to have been doing this all our lives.”

“We’ll jolly well have to.  We shall never be any good indoors again.”

“Has old Burton said anything?”

“I’m getting on.  I can drive as straight a furrow as any man in Gloucestershire.  I’ve told my father that.  He detests me; but he’d say you ought to work up from the plough-tail, if you must farm.  He turned all of us through his workshops before he took us into the business.  He liked to see us soaked in dirt and oil, crawling on our stomachs under his engines.  He’d simply love to see me here standing up to my knees in wet cow-dung.”