Mavis was not disposed to allow her small princess to take a tip from a stranger’s hand; but natural good-breeding forced her to acquiesce.

The ladies looked back at her, waved their hands by the garden gate, and went away talking.

“The child never said ‘Thank you.’  Badly reared.”

“But the mother thanked you.  I liked her face.  She must have been distinctly good-looking.”

The artists thought her distinctly good-looking even now, and perhaps, after being repulsed in their quest for bed and board, drifted off into an idle dream of how they might have met her a few years ago when they were less famous but more magnetically attractive.  What a sitter she would have been for them, if she wouldn’t be anything else!  They admired the extreme delicacy of her nose that seemed so narrow in the well-rounded face, the loose brown hair that showed such a red flash in it beneath her sunbonnet, the perfect modeling of full forearms, firm neck, and ample bosom, the whole poise of her graciously solid figure, at once so reposeful and so free.  But it was the eyes principally that set them dreaming of vanished youth, abandoned hopes, and lost opportunities.  Nowadays Mavis could meet the unduly interested regard of male investigators with a candid unvacillating outlook; there came no hint of feebleness in resistance, too ready submission, or temperamental proneness to surrender; but her eyes, whether she wished it or not, still served as messengers between all that was feminine in her and all that was masculine outside her; and, with no reason not to tell the truth, they told it boldly, seeming to say, “Yes, once I had much to give, and I gave every single bit of it to one man.  I have nothing left now for cadgers, sneak-thieves, and other outsiders.”

She was a woman steadily completing her cycle.  In fact, with her added weight, broadened contours and settled mental equilibrium, she had so changed from the slim, pallid, childish Mrs. Dale of the post office that any old Rodchurch friends might be forgiven for saying that they could scarcely recognize her.

“Really shouldn’t have known you,” said one of them frankly.  “You have furnished like a colt brought in from grass to corn.”

This outspoken old friend was Mr. Allen the saddler, who turned up one winter day when Vine-Pits had been thrown into a great state of excitement and confusion by the passage of the hunt right across the meadows behind the orchard.  Just after dinner everybody had heard the horn sounding in the woods, with distant holloas and deep music of hounds, and then the pack came streaming out in full cry, and next moment all the horsemen were galloping over the fields and leaping the hedges.  The women ran forth from the back of the house; the men abandoned their work.  “Oo, oo!  Look an’ look.”  There were shouts of rapture each time the horses jumped.  “Oo!  Crimany!  That were a beauty!”

Then in another minute Dale himself came galloping to the empty yard, rode his horse along the flags into the garden, and yelled to Mavis that she was to fetch trays of bread and cheese and bannocks as quick as life.