orchard; but who, with love in his heart, could kill anything on a day like this?  He entered a field where a young red bull was feeding.  It seemed to Ashurst that he looked like Joe.  But the young bull took no notice of this visitor, a little drunk himself, perhaps, on the singing and the glamour of the golden pasture, under his short legs.  Ashurst crossed out unchallenged to the hillside above the stream.  From that slope a for mounted to its crown of rocks.  The ground there was covered with a mist of bluebells, and nearly a score of crab-apple trees were in full bloom.  He threw himself down on the grass.  The change from the buttercup glory and oak-goldened glamour of the fields to this ethereal beauty under the grey for filled him with a sort of wonder; nothing the same, save the sound of running water and the songs of the cuckoos.  He lay there a long time, watching the sunlight wheel till the crab-trees threw shadows over the bluebells, his only companions a few wild bees.  He was not quite sane, thinking of that morning’s kiss, and of to-night under the apple tree.  In such a spot as this, fauns and dryads surely lived; nymphs, white as the crab-apple blossom, retired within those trees; fauns, brown as the dead bracken, with pointed ears, lay in wait for them.  The cuckoos were still calling when he woke, there was the sound of running water; but the sun had couched behind the tor, the hillside was cool, and some rabbits had come out.  ‘Tonight!’ he thought.  Just as from the earth everything was pushing up, unfolding under the soft insistent fingers of an unseen hand, so were his heart and senses being pushed, unfolded.  He got up and broke off a spray from a crab-apple tree.  The buds were like Megan—­shell-like, rose-pink, wild, and fresh; and so, too, the opening flowers, white, and wild; and touching.  He put the spray into his coat.  And all the rush of the spring within him escaped in a triumphant sigh.  But the rabbits scurried away.

6

It was nearly eleven that night when Ashurst put down the pocket “Odyssey” which for half an hour he had held in his hands without reading, and slipped through the yard down to the orchard.  The moon had just risen, very golden, over the hill, and like a bright, powerful, watching spirit peered through the bars of an ash tree’s half-naked boughs.  In among the apple trees it was still dark, and he stood making sure of his direction, feeling the rough grass with his feet.  A black mass close behind him stirred with a heavy grunting sound, and three large pigs settled down again close to each other, under the wall.  He listened.  There was no wind, but the stream’s burbling whispering chuckle had gained twice its daytime strength.  One bird, he could not tell what, cried “Pippip,” “Pip-pip,” with perfect monotony; he could hear a night-Jar spinning very far off; an owl hooting.  Ashurst moved a step or two, and again halted, aware of a dim living whiteness all round his head.