“I did want that rabbit to get off,” she sighed out; “I’ve been watching it.  Thank you!”

He looked at her.  “My goodness!” was all he said.

Noel’s hands flew up to her cheeks.  “Yes, I know; is my nose very red?”

“No; you’re as lovely as Ruth, if she was lovely.”

Swish-swish!  The cutter came by; Noel started forward to her place in the row; but catching her arm, he said:  “No, let me do this little bit.  I haven’t had a day in the fields since the war began.  Talk to me while I’m binding.”

She stood watching him.  He made a different, stronger twist from hers, and took larger sheaves, so that she felt a sort of jealousy.

“I didn’t know you knew about this sort of thing.”

“Oh, Lord, yes!  I had a farm once out West.  Nothing like field-work, to make you feel good.  I’ve been watching you; you bind jolly well.”

Noel gave a sigh of pleasure.

“Where have you come from?” she asked.

“Straight from the station.  I’m on my holiday.”  He looked up at her, and they both fell silent.

Swish-swish!  The cutter was coming again.  Noel went to the beginning of her portion of the falling corn, he to the end of it.  They worked towards each other, and met before the cutter was on them a third time.

“Will you come in to supper?”

“I’d love to.”

“Then let’s go now, please.  I don’t want to see any more rabbits killed.”

They spoke very little on the way to the bungalow, but she felt his eyes on her all the time.  She left him with George and Gratian who had just come in, and went up for her bath.

Supper had been laid out in the verandah, and it was nearly dark before they had finished.  In rhyme with the failing of the light Noel became more and more silent.  When they went in, she ran up to her baby.  She did not go down again, but as on the night before her father went away, stood at her window, leaning out.  A dark night, no moon; in the starlight she could only just see the dim garden, where no goat was grazing.  Now that her first excitement had worn off, this sudden reappearance of Fort filled her with nervous melancholy:  She knew perfectly well what he had come for, she had always known.  She had no certain knowledge of her own mind; but she knew that all these weeks she had been between his influence and her father’s, listening to them, as it were, pleading with her.  And, curiously, the pleading of each, instead of drawing her towards the pleader, had seemed dragging her away from him, driving her into the arms of the other.  To the protection of one or the other she felt she must go; and it humiliated her to think that in all the world there was no other place for her.  The wildness of that one night in the old Abbey seemed to have power to govern all her life to come.  Why should that one night, that one act, have this uncanny power to drive her this way or that,