When they stopped for tea, instead of running home as usual, she drank it cold out of a flask she had brought, ate a bun and some chocolate, and lay down on her back against the hedge.  She always avoided that group of her fellow workers round the tea-cans which the farmer’s wife brought out.  To avoid people, if she could, had become habitual to her now.  They must know about her, or would soon if she gave them the chance.  She had never lost consciousness of her ring-finger, expecting every eye to fall on it as a matter of course.  Lying on her face, she puffed her cigarette into the grass, and watched a beetle, till one of the sheep-dogs, scouting for scraps, came up, and she fed him with her second bun.  Having finished the bun, he tried to eat the beetle, and, when she rescued it, convinced that she had nothing more to give him, sneezed at her, and went away.  Pressing the end of her cigarette out against the bank, she turned over.  Already the driver was perched on his tiny seat, and his companion, whose business it was to free the falling corn, was getting up alongside.  Swish-swish!  It had begun again.  She rose, stretched herself, and went back to her place in the row.  The field would be finished to-night; she would have a lovely rest-all Sunday I Towards seven o’clock a narrow strip, not twenty yards broad, alone was left.  This last half hour was what Noel dreaded.  To-day it was worse, for the farmer had no cartridges left, and the rabbits were dealt with by hullabaloo and sticks and chasing dogs.  Rabbits were vermin, of course, and ate the crops, and must be killed; besides, they were good food, and fetched two shillings apiece; all this she knew but to see the poor frightened things stealing out, pounced on, turned, shouted at, chased, rolled over by great swift dogs, fallen on by the boys and killed and carried with their limp grey bodies upside down, so dead and soft and helpless, always made her feel quite sick.  She stood very still, trying not to see or hear, and in the corn opposite to her a rabbit stole along, crouched, and peeped.  ‘Oh!’ she thought, ’come out here, bunny.  I’ll let you away—­can’t you see I will?  It’s your only chance.  Come out!’ But the rabbit crouched, and gazed, with its little cowed head poked forward, and its ears laid flat; it seemed trying to understand whether this still thing in front of it was the same as those others.  With the thought, ’Of course it won’t while I look at it,’ Noel turned her head away.  Out of the corner of her eye she could see a man standing a few yards off.  The rabbit bolted out.  Now the man would shout and turn it.  But he did not, and the rabbit scuttled past him and away to the hedge.  She heard a shout from the end of the row, saw a dog galloping.  Too late!  Hurrah!  And clasping her hands, she looked at the man.  It was Fort!  With the queerest feeling—­amazement, pleasure, the thrill of conspiracy, she saw him coming up to her.