It seemed that the afternoon had now long possessed the fields, it had wakened into a live and electric blue the Enchanted Forest which she had last noticed shimmering in its noon green.

All the workers at the approach of Richard were working busily, bent ostentatiously in the form of hairpins up and down their rows.  The dragon was rippling anxiously along at the heels of the white horse; a helpless hoping for the best expressed itself in every spike along his spine.

“I don’t really know why she’s idling like that,” Sarah Brown heard him say in his breathy pathetic voice.  “I left her hard at work.  They’re all the same when my back’s turned.  A fellow needs to have eyes at the tip of his tail.”

“Are you suffering from that Leverhulme six-hour-working-day sort of feeling?” asked Richard politely of Sarah Brown, in the manner of an advertisement of a cure for indigestion, as he approached.  “I think it’s just splendid how receptive and progressive working people are in these days.”

“I was meditating suicide,” replied Sarah Brown candidly, if faintly.  “I am a stricken and useless parasite on the face of your fine earth.  But my hoe is too blunt.”

“I have a pocket-knife with three blades I could lend you,” said Richard, slapping himself enquiringly over several pockets.  “Or would you rather try a natty little spell I thought of this morning while I was shaving.  I think any one stricken might find it rather useful.”

“Ah, give it to me.  Give it to me,” said Sarah Brown.

The pain was like a wave breaking upon her, carrying her away from her safe shore of shadow, to be lost in seething and suffocating seas without rest.  Her eyes felt dried up with fever, and whenever she shut them, the darkness was filled with a jumble of nauseating squares in blue upon a mustard-coloured background.  The smell of beans was terrible.

Richard fumbled with something very badly folded up in newspaper.  He also tried ineffectively to light a match by wiping it helplessly against his riding breeches.  He seemed to have none of the small skill in details that comes to most people before they grow up.  He did everything as if he were doing it for the first time.

“I had nothing but the Morning Post to wrap it in,” he murmured.  “I’m afraid that may have spoilt the magic a little.”

It was the dragon finally who produced the necessary light.  After watching Richard with the anxious sympathy of one ineffectual for another, it said:  “Let me,” and kindly breathed out a little flame, which set the packet aflare for a moment.

The ashes fluttered down from Richard’s hand among the beans, and a thin violet stalk of smoke went up.

Sarah Brown smelt the unmistakable sour smell of magic, and saw soundless words moving Richard’s little khaki moustache.  Then she found that she had disappeared.