Apart from Maudie the yard was deserted now.  The horses moved restlessly in their loose-boxes, but there was no bustle of shirt-sleeved urchins with buckets and pitchforks mucking them out.  For it was Sunday morning, and the lads were elsewhere.

Arrayed on the long-backed roofs the fan-tails sidled, cooed, and blinked in the sun.  In a sycamore in the Paddock Close a hedge-sparrow raised its thin sweet song, and the celandine lifted a pale and fragile face under the beeches on the hillside.  Hope was everywhere except in Maudie’s heart, for February was already on the wane.

The back door of the house opened, and Mrs. Woodburn, grayer than of old, stately and aproned, stood in it with a corn-measure in her hand, and tossed showers of golden grain for the fan-tails who came fluttering to her call.

Albert, busy on his chin with a shaving brush, peeped surreptitiously round the door of the saddle-room, and seeing Ma opposite withdrew swiftly; but he kept the door ajar as though awaiting something he was determined not to miss.

Mrs. Woodburn retired indoors, and a few minutes later there came the noisy clacking of a horse and cart entering the cobbled yard.

Instantly Albert was all alert.  He flung a towel about his neck and looked out.

An ostler from Lewes, known familiarly as Cherry, had pulled up a dog-cart opposite the pump.  The old horse stretched his neck, shook his collar from his sweating shoulders, and, breathing on the water in the trough, drank delicately.

Mr. Silver descended from the cart.

He marked the fair lad in the door of the saddle-room and greeted him in his large and leisurely way: 

“Good morning, Albert,” he said.

“Morning, sir.”

“Where are the other lads?”

“Where they ought to be, sir.  In the Lads’ Barn, waiting for Miss Boy.”

“And why aren’t you there?” asked the young man, amused.

Albert, in fact, spent all his spare time of late shaving.  Indeed, he was in the habit of informing those he called his colleagues that unless he shaved three times a day he wasn’t ’ardly decent.

“I got to keep at it, sir,” he confided now to Mr. Silver.  “Else I gets it from Miss Boy.”

“What d’you get from her?” asked the young man blandly.  “A razor?”

Old Cherry chuckled.

“’E larders his chin and then scrapes the soap off,” he said.  “That amooses Albert, that does.”

The insult left the lad cold; but that was less because the insult was a feeble one than because his mind was elsewhere.

His eyes and whole attention were on the back of the departing toff.

There was something fascinating to Albert about that back this morning.  He followed the young man with the interest and the undisguised admiration of a Paris gamin watching an aristocrat go to the guillotine.

As the long back disappeared round a corner, the lad turned to Cherry and winked.