Chapter 1 - Page 2

blue boots of knitted yarn--and the murmured
babble of the child in reply.

The chief--almost the only--attraction of the young woman's
face was its mobility. When she looked down sideways to the
girl she became pretty, and even handsome, particularly that
in the action her features caught slantwise the rays of the
strongly coloured sun, which made transparencies of her
eyelids and nostrils and set fire on her lips. When she
plodded on in the shade of the hedge, silently thinking, she
had the hard, half-apathetic expression of one who deems
anything possible at the hands of Time and Chance except,
perhaps, fair play. The first phase was the work of Nature,
the second probably of civilization.

That the man and woman were husband and wife, and the
parents of the girl in arms there could be little doubt. No
other than such relationship would have accounted for the
atmosphere of stale familiarity which the trio carried along
with them like a nimbus as they moved down the road.

The wife mostly kept her eyes fixed ahead, though with
little interest--the scene for that matter being one that
might have been matched at almost any spot in any county in
England at this time of the year; a road neither straight
nor crooked, neither level nor hilly, bordered by hedges,
trees, and other vegetation, which had entered the
blackened-green stage of colour that the doomed leaves pass
through on their way to dingy, and yellow, and red. The
grassy margin of the bank, and the nearest hedgerow boughs,
were powdered by the dust that had been stirred over them by
hasty vehicles, the same dust as it lay on the road
deadening their footfalls like a carpet; and this, with the
aforesaid total absence of conversation, allowed every
extraneous sound to be heard.

For a long time there was none, beyond the voice of a weak
bird singing a trite old evening song that might doubtless
have been heard on the hill at the same hour, and with the
self-same trills, quavers, and breves, at any sunset of that
season for centuries untold. But as they approached the
village sundry distant shouts and rattles reached their ears
from some elevated spot in that direction, as yet screened
from view by foliage. When the outlying houses of Weydon-
Priors could just be described, the family group was met by
a turnip-hoer with his hoe on his shoulder, and his dinner-
bag suspended from it. The reader promptly glanced up.

"Any trade doing here?" he asked phlegmatically, designating
the village in his van by a wave of the broadsheet. And
thinking the labourer did not understand him, he added,
"Anything in the hay-trussing line?"

The turnip-hoer had already begun shaking his head. "Why,
save