It was evening by the time they drove back, and the shadows lay cool and long across the roads.  Urged on by visions of his snug stall, the pony went like the wind; neither of the two in the cart spoke much:  once he bent down to tuck the rugs more closely round her and his hand, touching hers, lingered a moment.  When they drove into the little yard, Lylie, the dairymaid, was mixing barley-meal and scald-milk for the pigs and carrying on bucolic flirtation with Billy Penticost.  With the sheepishness of his sex, that youth made a great business of setting off to the well, his pails slung outwards on a hoop.  The rustic comedy touched a long-atrophied fibre in Blanche.  On an impulse of simplicity, she told herself, “Yes, this is the best thing.  I won’t go back to town; I’ll live down here, close to the things that matter, and we’ll just be happy.”  In the rush of warm feeling she turned her eyes on Ishmael, her love for him expanding because of the love she felt for the unsentient things about her.  His heart leapt to the look.

“Will you come out into the big field after everyone has gone to bed?” he asked her, busy unfastening a trace; and as she bent over a buckle on her side of the pony she whispered, “Yes.”

She ate her supper in a state almost too placidly joyous for excitement, and afterwards went up to her room and sat with her elbows on the window-sill and her chin on her hands, looking out.  The corn had been cut and stacked in great Cornish arishmows, and Blanche, watching the orange moon swim up, told herself, “When that shadow has reached the nearest stook I will go.”  The shadow lay, finger-like, touching the stook, but still she sat on, reluctant to go out and make sure of her happiness.  The moon, paling to pearl as it rose, shone clearly into the room, making sharp shadows under the bed-curtains and lying slantwise on the white counterpane; Blanche rose and slipped off her frock; she moved as in a dream—­her affectations of thought fell away, leaving her instinctive.  She felt as though this lover were her first, and, without reasoning about it, knew she must be fitly dressed to meet him.  She bathed her face and hands in cold water, then put on a fresh muslin gown, moving to and fro in full view of anyone who might be in the sloping field outside.  She half hoped, quite innocently, that Ishmael was there watching; it seemed to her nothing unclean could live in the white light that permeated the very air of the room.  Overcome for a moment by the strength of her own emotions, she sat on the bed and buried her face in her hands.  As she looked at herself in the glass before leaving the room she smiled for pleasure that she was unpowdered and unrouged, not pausing, in her exalted mood, to wonder whether she would have faced the daylight so.  It was a better, an honester, Blanche, transmuted by happiness, that crept down the stairs, through the small garden and across the road into the field.  He was awaiting her by the hedge.