He pulled himself together with an unconscious movement of his shoulders.  Here was the day of early June, the gold of the sun in its morning, the green shadows, the turf they walked on together, the skylark rising again from the meadow and showering down its song.  Why think of anything else.  What a line that was which swept from her chin down her long slim throat to its hollow!  The colour between the velvet of her close-set lashes—­the remembrance of her curious splendid blush—­made the man’s lost and unlived youth come back to him.  What did it matter whether she was American or English—­what did it matter whether she was insolently rich or beggarly poor?  He would let himself go and forget all but the pleasure of the sight and hearing of her.

So as they went they found themselves laughing together and talking without restraint.  They went through the flower and kitchen gardens; they saw the once fallen wall rebuilt now with the old brick; they visited the greenhouses and came upon Kedgers entranced with business, but enraptured at being called upon to show his treasures.  His eyes, turning magnetised upon Betty, revealed the story of his soul.  Mount Dunstan remarked that when he spoke to her of his flowers it was as if there existed between them the sympathy which might be engendered between two who had sat up together night after night with delicate children.

“He’s stronger to-day, miss,” he said, as they paused before a new wonderful bloom.  “What he’s getting now is good for him.  I had to change his food, miss, but this seems all right.  His colour’s better.”

Betty herself bent over the flower as she might have bent over a child.  Her eyes softened, she touched a leaf with a slim finger, as delicately as if it had been a new-born baby’s cheek.  As Mount Dunstan watched her he drew a step nearer to her side.  For the first time in his life he felt the glow of a normal and simple pleasure untouched by any bitterness.

CHAPTER XXVIII

SETTING THEM THINKING

Old Doby, sitting at his open window, with his pipe and illustrated papers on the table by his side, began to find life a series of thrills.  The advantage of a window giving upon the village street unspeakably increased.  For many years he had preferred the chimney corner greatly, and had rejoiced at the drawing in of winter days when a fire must be well kept up, and a man might bend over it, and rub his hands slowly gazing into the red coals or little pointed flames which seemed the only things alive and worthy the watching.  The flames were blue at the base and yellow at the top, and jumped looking merry, and caught at bits of black coal, and set them crackling and throwing off splinters till they were ablaze and as much alive as the rest.  A man could get comfort and entertainment therefrom.  There was naught else so good to live with.  Nothing happened in the street, and every dull face that passed was an old story, and told an old tale of stupefying hard labour and hard days.