But her beautiful head, with its wealth of brown hair, and her face, with its sensuous fulness of cheek and lip, its rounded lines, and lovely colour—­like a slightly overblown rose—­were greatly set off by the simple folds of blue linen; and her feet and legs, shapely but not small, in their khaki stockings and shoes, completed the general effect of lissom youth.  The flush and heat of hard bodily work had passed away.  She had had time to plunge her face into cold water and smooth her hair.  But the atmosphere of the harvest field, its ripeness and glow, seemed to be still about her.  A classically minded man might have thought of some nymph in the train of Demeter, might have fancied a horn of plenty, or a bow, slung from the sunburnt neck.

But the vicar had forgotten his classics. En revanche, however, he was doing his best to show himself sympathetic and up-to-date with regard to women and their new spheres of work—­especially on the land.  He had noticed three girls, he said, working in the harvest field.  Two of them he recognized as from the village; the third he supposed was a stranger?

“She comes from Ralstone,” said Rachel.

“Ah, that’s the village where the new timber camp is.  You really must see that camp, Miss Henderson.”

“I hate to think of the woods coming down,” she said, frowning a little.

“We all do.  But that’s the war.  It can’t be helped, alack!  But it’s wonderful to see the women at work, measuring and checking, doing the brain work, in fact, while the men do the felling and loading.  It makes one envious.”

The vicar sighed.  A flush appeared on his young but slightly cadaverous face.

“Of the men—­or the women?”

“Oh, their work, I mean.  They’re doing something for the war.  I’ve done my best.  But the Bishop won’t hear of it.”

And he rather emphatically explained how he had applied in vain for an army chaplaincy.  Health and the shortage of clergy had been against him.  “I suppose there must be some left at home,” he said with a shrug, “and the doctors seem to have a down on me.”

Janet was quite sorry for the young man—­he was so eagerly apologetic, so anxious to propitiate what he imagined ought to be their feelings about him.  And Rachel all the time sat so silent and unresponsive.

Miss Leighton drew the conversation back to the timber camp; she would like to go and see it, she said.  Every one knew the Canadians were wonderful lumbermen.

The Vicar’s eyes had travelled back to Rachel.

“Were you ever in Canada, Miss Henderson?” The question was evidently thrown out nervously at a venture, just to evoke a word or a smile from the new mistress of the farm.

Rachel Henderson frowned slightly before replying.

“Yes, I have been in Canada.”

“You have?  Oh, then, you know all about it.”

“I know nothing about Canadian lumbering.”