Rachel stood looking at the scene, possessed by a pleasure which in her was always an ardour.  She felt nothing by halves.  The pulse of life beat in her still with an energy, a passion, that astonished herself.  She was full of eagerness for her new work and for success in it, full of desires, too, for vague, half-seen things, things she had missed so Far—­her own fault.  But somewhere in the long, hidden years, they must, they should be waiting for her.

The harvest was magnificent.  She had paid the Wellins a high price for the standing crops, but there was going to be a profit on her bargain.  Her mind was full of schemes, if only she could get the labour to carry them out.  Farming was now on the up-grade.  She had come into it at the very best moment, and England would never let farming go down again, after the war, for her own safety’s sake.

The War!  She felt towards it as to some distant force, which, so far as she personally was concerned, was a force for good.  Owing to the war, farming was booming all over England, and she was in the boom, taking advantage of it.  Yet she was ashamed to think of the war only in that way.  She tried to tame the strange ferment in her blood, and could only do it by reminding herself of Hastings’s wounded son, whose letter he had showed her.  And then—­in imagination—­she began to see thousands of others like him, in hospital beds, or lying dead in trampled fields.  Her mood softened, the tears came into her eyes.

Suddenly—­a slight whimper—­a child’s whimper—­close beside her.  She paused in amazement, looking round her, till the whimper was renewed; and there, almost at her feet, cradled in the fragrant hollow of a wheat stook, she saw a tiny child—­a baby about a year old, a fair, plump thing, just waking from sleep.

At sight of the face bending over her, the child set up a louder cry, which was not angry, however, only forlorn.  The tears welled fast into her blue eyes.  She looked piteously at Rachel.

“Mummy, mummy!”

“You poor little thing!” said Rachel.  “Whose are you?”

One of the village women who had been helping in the “shocking,” she supposed, had brought the child.  She had noticed a little girl playing about the reapers in the afternoon—­no doubt an elder sister brought to look after the baby.  Between the mother and the sister there must have been some confusion, and one or other would come running back directly.

But meanwhile she took up the child, who at first resisted passionately, fighting with all its chubby strength against the strange arms.  But Rachel seemed to have a way with her—­a spell, which worked.  She bent over the little thing, soothing and cooing to her, and then finding a few crumbs of cake in the pocket of her overall, the remains of her own lunch in the field, she daintily fed the rosy mouth, till the sobs ceased and the child stared upwards in a sleep wonder, her blue eyes held by the brown ones above her.