Nicky wanted to take Ishmael away, but the old man insisted on being left alone with his dead brother for a while, and when Nicky, determined not to go far or be more than a few minutes away, had left the room, Ishmael went to the fire and dropped the letters in it one by one.  He watched them burn away, and then crossing over to the bed again he sat down slowly in the chair beside it.

Nicky had to send for the doctor, give the news to Marjorie, parry Jim’s questionings; and when at last he went upstairs again it was to find Ishmael, in a deep sleep, slipped forward in his chair as though he had never left it, his head against the edge of the bed, so that the outflung dead hand of Archelaus almost touched his white hair.

CHAPTER V

REAPING

August came in hot and clear, all over the countryside the crops ripened well, and now, in the last quarter of the moon, they were ripe to cut.  Ishmael went down to the four-acre with Nicky to see the men at work, and Jim, who for days had been on the tiptoe of excitement over the advent of “the machine,” as the binder was always called, ran in front of them.

The men had cleared a path some five feet wide all round the field with their scythes, and now the clattering thing, crimson painted, blatant, was going on with the work, and the great square of oats and barley stood up compact and close; while round and round it, diminishing it every time, went the machine, drawn by three glossy horses harnessed unicorn fashion.

Up the slope of the field they went, heads nodding, swelling sides glistening in the sun, while Jimmy, proudly perched upon the leader, his legs sticking out straight on either side, chirruped an encouragement lost in the clatter.  Up they came, till the three brown heads, the forelocks blown about their rolling eyes, were clear cut against the blue of the sea; then the man perched on his high iron seat tugged at the reins, and the three horses and the clamorous machine came swirling round the bend of the field and past the waiting knot of people.  The huge wheel, made of flail-like pieces set horizontally on spidery arms, went thrashing round, scooping the standing corn on to the knife, which cut it and thrust it into the mysterious recesses of the machine in the twinkling of the blade.  The next instant the bound bundle, neatly knotted round with string, was vomited forth on the far side....

So the machine—­capable, crimson, noisy—­went on its magic way with a glitter of whirling metal and a rhythmic clatter, the white blades of the wheel flashing up against the sky.  And a quiet little old man in shirt-sleeves and trousers all of a soft faded blue bent about in the stubble at its wake, leaning the bundles up, three together, against each other, the delicate heads interlacing, and the fresh green of the “lug”—­the clover and other green things cut with the crop that make it so rich a food for the cattle—­showing through the stems here and there.