transfixed by the wonder of the bodyless voice and would not pay any attention to her directions, but continued to gape.  She saw that she would have to go and show him herself, and after only half a moment’s reluctance she stepped forward.  She did not really mind people seeing her, because she knew that it was only a convention that she was ugly because she was going to have a baby.  For there was now a richer colour on her cheeks and lips than there had ever been before and her body was like a vase.  It was only when they had awful thoughts about her that she hated meeting them, and George would not have awful thoughts about her if she did him a good turn.  So she went over to him, pointing to the pit.  “I saw it roll down there, George.  Look!  There it is.”

But he did not pick up the ball.  He appeared to be petrified by the sight of her.  “Make haste,” she said, “they’ll be waiting for you.”  At that he dropped his lids, and his lips thickened, and his face grew red.  Then he raised his head again and looked at her with eyes that were not dull, as she had always seen them before, but hot and bright, and he began to shift his weight slowly backwards and forwards from one foot to the other.  Her heart grew sick, because all the world was like this, and she turned again to the path home.  But through the tree-trunks in that direction there came two other boys in search of the ball—­Ned Turk, who to-day was the station-master at Roothing station, and Bobbie Wickes; and at the sight of her they stood stock-still as George Postgate had done, and, like him, dropped their heads and flushed and lifted lewd faces.  A horror came on her.  It was as if they had assumed masks to warn her that they had some secret and sinister business with her.  Then one pointed his hand at her and made an animal noise, and the other laughed with his mouth wide open.  Neither said anything.  Their minds were evidently engaged in processes beneath those which find expression in language.  She stiffened herself to face them, though she felt frightened that these two boys, whom she had known all her life, with whom she had ridden on the hay-wains in summer and caught stickle-backs in the marsh dykes, should change to these speechless beings with red leering masks who meant her ill.

For the first time she felt herself too young for her destiny.  “I am only nineteen,” she cried silently.  Tears might have disgraced her but that the child moved in her as if it had looked out at the frightening figures through her eyes, and she suddenly hated Harry for leaving her and his son unprotected from such brutes as people seemed to be, and was vivified by the hatred.  She made to walk past the boys back towards Yaverland’s End, but as she moved they sent up shrill wordless calls to their fellows who were still in the fields, which were immediately answered.  She realised that any minute the woods would be full of lads whom the sight of her would change to obscene creatures, and