“Why didn’t you?”

“Because Dicky’s always funny when you want to be serious and George is always serious when you want to be funny.  Besides, he’s so good.  His goodness would have been too much for me altogether.  Fancy beginning with George.”

“This seems to have been a pretty rotten beginning, anyway.”

“The beginning was all right.  It’s the end that’s rotten.  The really awful thing was Effie.”

“Look here—­” Gwinnie left off rocking and swung herself to the edge of the bed.  Her face looked suddenly mature and full of wisdom.  “I don’t believe in that Effie business.  You want to think you stopped it because of Effie; but you didn’t.  You’ve got to see it straight....  It was his lying and funking that finished you.  He fixed on the two things you can’t stand.”

The two things.  The two things.

“I know what you want.  You want to kill him in my mind, so that I shan’t think of him any more.  I’m not thinking.  I only wanted you to know.”

“Does anybody else know?”

She shook her head.

“Well—­don’t you let them.”

Gwinnie slid to her feet and went to the looking-glass.  She stood there a minute, pinning closer the crushed bosses of her hair.  Then she turned.

“What are you going to do with that walking-tour johnnie?”

“John—­Conway?  You couldn’t do anything with him if you tried.  He’s miles beyond all that.”

“All what?”

“The rotten things people do.  The rotten things they think.  You’re safe with him, Gwinnie.  Safe.  Safe.  You’ve only to look at him.”

“I have looked at him.  Whatever you do, don’t tell him, Sharlie.”

III

Charlotte sat on the top of the slope in the field below Barrow Farm.  John Conway lay at her feet.  The tall beeches stood round them in an unclosed ring.

Through the opening she could see the farmhouse, three ball-topped gables, the middle one advancing, the front built out there in a huge door-place that carried a cross windowed room under its roof.

Low heavy-browed mullions; the panes, black shining slits in the grey and gold of the stone.  All their rooms.  Hers and Gwinnie’s under the near gable by the fir-trees, Mr. and Mrs. Burton’s under the far gable by the elms, John’s by itself in the middle, jutting out.

She could see the shallow garden dammed up to the house out of the green field by its wall, spilling trails of mauve campanula, brimming with pink phlox and white phlox, the blue spires of the lupins piercing up through the froth.

Sunday evening half an hour before milking-time.  From September nineteen-thirteen to December—­to March nineteen-fourteen, to June—­she had been at the farm nine months.  June—­May—­April.  This time three months ago John had come.

In the bottom of the field, at the corner by the yard-gate, under the elms, she could see Gwinnie astride over the tilted bucket, feeding the calves.  It was Gwinnie’s turn.