to her.  Something in the character of the labourer’s daughter seemed to make a special appeal to the delicate and mystical temper of the vicar’s sister, in whom the ardour of the “watcher for souls” was a natural gift.  Jenny seemed to be aware of it.  She was flushed and a little excited, alternately shy and communicative—­like the bird under fascination, already alive to the signal of its captor.  At any rate, Margaret Shenstone kept both her companions happy through the meal.

The vicar employed himself in vigorously making friends with Janet Leighton, keenly alive all the time to that vivid and flower-like vision of Miss Henderson at the farther end of the table.  But some instinct warned him that beside the splendid fellow in khaki his own claim on her could be but a modest one.  He must watch his opportunity.  It was natural that certain misgivings had already begun to rise in the mind of his elder sister, Eleanor, who was his permanent companion and housekeeper at the vicarage.  For why should her brother be so specially assiduous in the harvest operations at Great End?  She was well aware that it was the right and popular thing for the young clergy who were refused service at the front to be seen in their shirt sleeves as agricultural volunteers, or in some form of war work.  A neighbouring curate in whom she was greatly interested spent the greater part of his week, for instance, on munition work at a national factory.  She thought him a hero.  But if it was to be harvesting, then it seemed to her that her brother should have divided his help more evenly among the farms of the village.  She was afraid of “talk.”  And it troubled her greatly that neither Miss Henderson nor Miss Leighton came to church.

Meanwhile, the vicar, like a wise man, was securing the position with Janet.  What he wished, what he was really driving at, he would not let himself inquire.  What he knew was that no woman had ever fluttered his quiet mind as Miss Henderson had fluttered it during these summer weeks.  To watch her, erect and graceful, “pitching” the sheaves on to the harvest cart, where he and a labourer received and packed them; to be privileged to lead the full cart home, with her smile and thanks at the barn door for reward, or to stand with her while she proudly watched her new reaping machine, with the three fine horses abreast, sweeping round her biggest field, while the ripe sheaves fell beside it, as of old they fell beside the reapers that Hoephoestus wrought in gleaming gold on the shield of Achilles; and then perhaps to pay a last visit with her to the farm buildings in the warm dusk and watch the cattle coming in from the fields and the evening feed, and all the shutting up for the night after the long, hot, busy day:  these things had lately made a veritable idyll of the vicar’s life.  He felt as though a hundred primitive sensations and emotions, that he had only talked of or read about before, had at last become real to him.  Oxford memories revived.  He actually felt a wish to look at his Virgil or Theocritus again, such as had never stirred in him since he had packed his Oxford books to send home, after the sobering announcement of his third class.  After all, it seemed these old fellows knew something about the earth and its joys!