“Ah!”

He paused, a broad smile overspreading his bronzed face.

For he had perceived a popular History of the War lying open and face downwards on the table, one that he had recommended to the mistress of the farm.  So she had followed his advice.  It pleased him particularly!  He had gathered that she was never a great reader; still, she was an educated woman, she ought to know something of what her country had done.

And there was actually a piano!  He wondered whether she played, or her friend.

Meanwhile Rachel was changing her dress upstairs—­rather deliberately.  She did not want to look too glad to see her visitor, to flatter him by too much hurry.  When he arrived she had just come in from the fields where she had been at the threshing machine all day.  It had covered her with dirt and chaff; and the process of changing was only half through when she heard the rattle of Ellesborough’s cycle outside.  She stood now before the glass, a radiant daughter of air and earth; her veins, as it were, still full of the sheer pleasure of her long day among the stubbles and the young stock.  She was tired, of course; and she knew very well that the winter, when it came, would make a great difference, and that much of the work before her would be hard and disagreeable.  But for the moment, her deep satisfaction with the life she had chosen, the congruity between it and her, gave her a peculiar charm.  She breathed content, and there is no more beautifying thing.

She had thought a good deal about Ellesborough since their meeting; yet not absorbingly, for she had her work to do.  She was rather inclined to quarrel with him for having been so long in making his call; and this feeling, perhaps, induced her to dawdle a little over the last touches of her toilet.  She had put on a thin, black dress, which tamed the exuberance of her face and hair, and set off the brilliance and fineness of her skin where the open blouse displayed it.  The beautiful throat was sunburnt, indeed, but not unbecomingly so; and she was about to fasten round it a slender gold chain, when she suddenly dropped the chain.  Some association had passed through her mind which made her shrink from it.

She chose instead a necklace of bluish-green beads, long, and curiously interwoven, which gave a touch of dignity to the plain dress.  Then she paused to consider the whole effect, in a spirit of meditation rather than mere vanity. “I wish he knew!” she thought, and the glass reflected a frown of perplexity.  Had she been wise, after all, to make such a complete mystery of the past?  People in and about Ipscombe would probably know some time—­what all her Canadian friends knew.  And then, the thought of the endless explanations and gossip, of the horrid humiliation involved in any renewed contact whatever with the ugly things she had put behind her, roused a sudden, surging disgust.

“Yes, I was quite right,” she thought vehemently.  “I was quite right!”