Mrs. Poyser was not to be caught in the weakness of smiling at a compliment, but a quiet complacency over-spread her face like a stealing sunbeam, and gave a milder glance than usual to her blue-grey eyes, as she looked at Adam drinking the whey.  Ah!  I think I taste that whey now—­with a flavour so delicate that one can hardly distinguish it from an odour, and with that soft gliding warmth that fills one’s imagination with a still, happy dreaminess.  And the light music of the dropping whey is in my ears, mingling with the twittering of a bird outside the wire network window—­the window overlooking the garden, and shaded by tall Guelder roses.

“Have a little more, Mr. Bede?” said Mrs. Poyser, as Adam set down the basin.

“No, thank you; I’ll go into the garden now, and send in the little lass.”

“Aye, do; and tell her to come to her mother in the dairy.”

Adam walked round by the rick-yard, at present empty of ricks, to the little wooden gate leading into the garden—­once the well-tended kitchen-garden of a manor-house; now, but for the handsome brick wall with stone coping that ran along one side of it, a true farmhouse garden, with hardy perennial flowers, unpruned fruit-trees, and kitchen vegetables growing together in careless, half-neglected abundance.  In that leafy, flowery, bushy time, to look for any one in this garden was like playing at “hide-and-seek.”  There were the tall hollyhocks beginning to flower and dazzle the eye with their pink, white, and yellow; there were the syringas and Guelder roses, all large and disorderly for want of trimming; there were leafy walls of scarlet beans and late peas; there was a row of bushy filberts in one direction, and in another a huge apple-tree making a barren circle under its low-spreading boughs.  But what signified a barren patch or two?  The garden was so large.  There was always a superfluity of broad beans—­it took nine or ten of Adam’s strides to get to the end of the uncut grass walk that ran by the side of them; and as for other vegetables, there was so much more room than was necessary for them that in the rotation of crops a large flourishing bed of groundsel was of yearly occurrence on one spot or other.  The very rose-trees at which Adam stopped to pluck one looked as if they grew wild; they were all huddled together in bushy masses, now flaunting with wide-open petals, almost all of them of the streaked pink-and-white kind, which doubtless dated from the union of the houses of York and Lancaster.  Adam was wise enough to choose a compact Provence rose that peeped out half-smothered by its flaunting scentless neighbours, and held it in his hand—­he thought he should be more at ease holding something in his hand—­as he walked on to the far end of the garden, where he remembered there was the largest row of currant-trees, not far off from the great yew-tree arbour.

But he had not gone many steps beyond the roses, when he heard the shaking of a bough, and a boy’s voice saying, “Now, then, Totty, hold out your pinny—­there’s a duck.”