in order that she might know what disgrace she had brought on her family, and in the night she had often lain in a sweat of rage, wanting to kill these liars.  But that day, standing in the sunshine, she forgave them.  She was glad that they had such brave yellow sunflowers in their little wood-fenced gardens:  she hoped that all the women would sometimes be as happy as she was.  She did not know that this was no day for her to venture forth and forgive her enemies, since it was the Lord’s Day, when men ceased to do any manner of work, that they may keep it holy.

The first warning she was given was a sudden impact on a high branch of an oak-tree a yard or two from where she stood, and the falling to earth, delayed by the thick crepitant layers of green-gold, sun-soaked leaves, of a cricket ball.  With the perversity of rolling things it dribbled along the broken ground and dropped at last into a mossy pit half filled with dead leaves which marked where a gale had once torn up a young tree by the roots; and the next moment she heard, not distantly, the open-mouthed howl that comes from a cricket-field in a moment of crisis.  Then she remembered that it was a habit of the young bloods of Roothing to evade their elders’ feeling about Sabbath observance by going in the afternoon to an overlooked wedge of ground that ran into the woods and playing some sort of bat-and-ball game.  This must be Sunday.  If she did not go home at once she would begin to meet the village lovers, who would not understand how well she wished them, and would look at her with the hostility that the lucky feel for the unlucky.  But when she turned to follow the homeward path she heard from all over the wood scattered shouts.  The lads were looking for their ball.  One she could hear, from the breaking down of brushwood, was quite close to her.  Her best plan was to hide.  So she stood quite still under the low branches of an elder-tree, while George Postgate doubled by.

Poor George!  He was seventeen, and big for that, but his mind had stayed at twelve, and he was perpetually being admitted in probation to the society of lads of his own age, and then for some act of thick-wittedness being expelled again.  It was plain from the way that his great horny fingers were scratching his head and his vast mouth was drooping at the corners that it was his fault that the ball crashed so disastrously out of bounds, and that he felt himself on the verge of another expulsion.  “Oh, ter dash with the thing!” he exclaimed mournfully, and kicked a root, and lifted his face to the patch of blue sky above and snuffled.  Marion’s heart dissolved.  She could not let this poor stupid thing suffer an ache which she was prevented from relieving only by a fear of rudeness which was probably quite unjustified.  “George!” she called softly, staying among the branches.  He gaped about him.  “George!” she called a little louder.  “The ball’s in the pit, among the leaves.”  But he was