CHAPTER

    I A Family Album
   II What Men Live By
  III First Furrow
   IV The Shadow at the Window
    V Lull Before Storm
   VI The Bush-Beating
  VII The Heart of the Cyclone
 VIII New Horizons
   IX Hidden Springs
    X Blind Steps
   XI Glamour
  XII Sheaves
 XIII The Stile
  XIV A Letter
   XV Blown Husks
  XVI The Grey World
 XVII The Cliff and the Valley
XVIII The Immortal Moment

BOOK III—­RIPENING

CHAPTER

    I Under-Currents
   II The Passage
  III Phoebe Pays Toll
   IV The Discovering of Nicky
    V Centripetal Movement
   VI The Nation and Nicky
  VII Paradise Cottage Again
 VIII What Nicky Did
   IX Judith’s White Night
    X Lone Trails
   XI Ways of Love
  XII Georgie

BOOK IV—­THE SHADOW OF THE SCYTHE

CHAPTER

    I Questions of Vision
   II Autumn
  III Bodies of Fire
   IV The New Judith
    V The Parson’s Philosophy
   VI “Something Must Come to All of Us...” 
  VII Earth

BOOK V—­HARVEST

CHAPTER

    I The Four-Acre
   II Archelaus, Nicky, Jim
  III The Letters
   IV Hester
    V Reaping
   VI Threshing
  VII Garnered Grain

Epilogue

BOOK I

SOWING

SECRET BREAD

PROLOGUE

There was silence in the room where James Ruan lay in the great bed, awaiting his marriage and his death—­a silence so hushed that it was not broken, only faintly stirred, by the knocking of a fitful wind at the casement, and the occasional collapse of the glowing embers on the hearth.  The firelight flickered over the whitewashed walls, which were dimmed to a pearly greyness by the stronger light without; the sick man’s face was deep in shadow under the bed canopy, but one full-veined hand showed dark upon the blue and white check of the counterpane.  All life, both without and within, was dying life—­waning day at the casement, failing fire on the hearth, and in the shadowy bed a man’s soul waiting to take wing.

Ruan lay with closed eyes, so still he might have been unconscious, but in reality he was gathering together all of force and energy he possessed; every sense was concentrated on the bare act of keeping alive—­keenly and clearly alive—­until the wished-for thing was accomplished.  Then, the effort over, the stored-up vitality spent, he hoped to go out swiftly, no dallying on the dim borderland.  As he lay his closed lids seemed like dull red films against the firelight, and across them floated a series of memory-pictures, which he noted curiously, even with a dry amusement.