from prison.  And this was all so unusual with Barbara, whose body was too perfect, too sanely governed by the flow of her blood not to revel in the moment and the things thereof.  She knew it was unusual.  After her ride she avoided lunch, and walked out into the lanes.  But about two o’clock, feeling very hungry, she went into a farmhouse, and asked for milk.  There, in the kitchen, like young jackdaws in a row with their mouths a little open, were the three farm boys, seated on a bench gripped to the alcove of the great fire-way, munching bread and cheese.  Above their heads a gun was hung, trigger upwards, and two hams were mellowing in the smoke.  At the feet of a black-haired girl, who was slicing onions, lay a sheep dog of tremendous age, with nose stretched out on paws, and in his little blue eyes a gleam of approaching immortality.  They all stared at, Barbara.  And one of the boys, whose face had the delightful look of him who loses all sense of other things in what he is seeing at the moment, smiled, and continued smiling, with sheer pleasure.  Barbara drank her milk, and wandered out again; passing through a gate at the bottom of a steep, rocky tor, she sat down on a sun-warmed stone.  The sunlight fell greedily on her here, like an invisible swift hand touching her all over, and specially caressing her throat and face.  A very gentle wind, which dived over the tor tops into the young fern; stole down at her, spiced with the fern sap.  All was warmth and peace, and only the cuckoos on the far thorn trees—­as though stationed by the Wistful Master himself—­were there to disturb her heart:  But all the sweetness and piping of the day did not soothe her.  In truth, she could not have said what was the matter, except that she felt so discontented, and as it were empty of all but a sort of aching impatience with—­what exactly she could not say.  She had that rather dreadful feeling of something slipping by which she could not catch.  It was so new to her to feel like that—­for no girl was less given to moods and repinings.  And all the time a sort of contempt for this soft and almost sentimental feeling made her tighten her lips and frown.  She felt distrustful and sarcastic towards a mood so utterly subversive of that fetich ‘Hardness,’ to the unconscious worship of which she had been brought up.  To stand no sentiment or nonsense either in herself or others was the first article of faith; not to slop-over anywhere.  So that to feel as she did was almost horrible to Barbara.  Yet she could not get rid of the sensation.  With sudden recklessness she tried giving herself up to it entirely.  Undoing the scarf at her throat, she let the air play on her bared neck, and stretched out her arms as if to hug the wind to her; then, with a sigh, she got up, and walked on.  And now she began thinking of ‘Anonyma’; turning her position over and over.  The idea that anyone young and beautiful should thus be clipped off in her life, roused her impatient indignation.  Let them