His advice was followed.  But to write that polite letter, which said nothing, cost Gratian a sleepless night, and two or three hours’ penmanship.  She was very conscientious.  Knowledge of this impending visit increased the anxiety with which she watched her sister, but the only inkling she obtained of Noel’s state of mind was when the girl showed her a letter she had received from Thirza, asking her to come back to Kestrel.  A postscript, in Uncle Bob’s handwriting, added these words: 

“We’re getting quite fossilised down here; Eve’s gone and left us again.  We miss you and the youngster awfully.  Come along down, Nollie there’s a dear!”

“They’re darlings,” Noel said, “but I shan’t go.  I’m too restless, ever since Daddy went; you don’t know how restless.  This rain simply makes me want to die.”

2

The weather improved next day, and at the end of that week harvest began.  By what seemed to Noel a stroke of luck the farmer’s binder was broken; he could not get it repaired, and wanted all the human binders he could get.  That first day in the fields blistered her hands, burnt her face and neck, made every nerve and bone in her body ache; but was the happiest day she had spent for weeks, the happiest perhaps since Cyril Morland left her, over a year ago.  She had a bath and went to bed the moment she got in.

Lying there nibbling chocolate and smoking a cigarette, she luxuriated in the weariness which had stilled her dreadful restlessness.  Watching the smoke of her cigarette curl up against the sunset glow which filled her window, she mused:  If only she could be tired out like this every day!  She would be all right then, would lose the feeling of not knowing what she wanted, of being in a sort o of large box, with the lid slammed down, roaming round it like a dazed and homesick bee in an overturned tumbler; the feeling of being only half alive, of having a wing maimed so that she could only fly a little way, and must then drop.

She slept like a top that night.  But the next day’s work was real torture, and the third not much better.  By the end of the week, however, she was no longer stiff.

Saturday was cloudless; a perfect day.  The field she was working in lay on a slope.  It was the last field to be cut, and the best wheat yet, with a glorious burnt shade in its gold and the ears blunt and full.  She had got used now to the feel of the great sheaves in her arms, and the binding wisps drawn through her hand till she held them level, below the ears, ready for the twist.  There was no new sensation in it now; just steady, rather dreamy work, to keep her place in the row, to the swish-swish of the cutter and the call of the driver to his horses at the turns; with continual little pauses, to straighten and rest her back a moment, and shake her head free from the flies, or suck her finger, sore from the constant pushing of the straw ends under.  So the hours went on, rather hot and wearisome, yet with a feeling of something good being done, of a job getting surely to its end.  And gradually the centre patch narrowed, and the sun slowly slanted down.