Nedda felt something clutch her heart.  What was that figure in blue?  Priestess?  Prophetess?  And for a moment the girl felt herself swept into the vision those dark glowing eyes were seeing; some violent, exalted, inexorable, flaming vision.  Then something within her revolted, as though one had tried to hypnotize her into seeing what was not true; as though she had been forced for the moment to look, not at what was really there, but at what those eyes saw projected from the soul behind them.  And she said quietly: 

“I don’t believe, Aunt Kirsteen.  I don’t really believe.  I think it must go out.”

Kirsteen turned.

“You are like your father,” she said—­“a doubter.”

Nedda shook her head.

“I can’t persuade myself to see what isn’t there.  I never can, Aunt Kirsteen.”

Without reply, save a quiver of her brows, Kirsteen went back into the house.  And Nedda stayed on the pebbled path before the cottage, unhappy, searching her own soul.  Did she fail to see because she was afraid to see, because she was too dull to see; or because, as she had said, there was really nothing there—­no flames to leap from hill to hill, no lift, no tearing in the sky that hung over the land?  And she thought:  ’London—­all those big towns, their smoke, the things they make, the things we want them to make, that we shall always want them to make.  Aren’t they there?  For every laborer who’s a slave Dad says there are five town workers who are just as much slaves!  And all those Bigwigs with their great houses, and their talk, and their interest in keeping things where they are!  Aren’t they there?  I don’t—­I can’t believe anything much can happen, or be changed.  Oh!  I shall never see visions, and dream dreams!’ And from her heart she sighed.

In the meantime Derek and Sheila were going their round on bicycles, to stiffen the backs of the laborers.  They had hunted lately, always in a couple, desiring no complications, having decided that it was less likely to provoke definite assault and opposition from the farmers.  To their mother was assigned all correspondence; to themselves the verbal exhortations, the personal touch.  It was past noon, and they were already returning, when they came on the char-a-bancs containing the head of the strike-breaking column.  The two vehicles were drawn up opposite the gate leading to Marrow Farm, and the agent was detaching the four men destined to that locality, with their camping-gear.  By the open gate the farmer stood eying his new material askance.  Dejected enough creatures they looked—­poor devils picked up at ten pound the dozen, who, by the mingled apathy and sheepish amusement on their faces, might never have seen a pitchfork, or smelled a field of clover, in their lives.

The two young Freelands rode slowly past; the boy’s face scornfully drawn back into itself; the girl’s flaming scarlet.

“Don’t take notice,” Derek said; “we’ll soon stop that.”