one April day when the young lambs were
bleating on the sheltered innings and making bright clean spots of white
beside the ewes' fog-soiled fleeces, when the tegs had come down from
their winter keep inland, and the sunset fell in long golden slats
across the first water-green grass of spring. The years had aged him
more than they had aged Joanna--the marks on her face were chiefly
weather marks, tokens of her exposure to marsh suns and winds, and of
her own ruthless applications of yellow soap. Behind them was a little
of the hardness which comes when a woman has to fight many battles and
has won her victories largely through the sacrifice of her resources.
The lines on his face were mostly those of his own humour and other
people's sorrows, he had exposed himself perhaps not enough to the
weather and too much to the world, so that where she had fine lines and
a fundamental hardness, he had heavy lines like the furrows of a
ploughshare, and a softness beneath them like the fruitful soil that the
share turns up.

Joanna received him in state, with Arthur Alce's teapot and her best
pink silk blouse with the lace insertion. Ellen, for fairly obvious
reasons, preferred not to be present. Joanna was terrified lest he
should begin to talk of Martin, so after she had conformed to local
etiquette by inquiring after his health and abusing the weather, she
offered him the living of Brodnyx with Pedlinge and a slice of cake
almost in the same breath.

She was surprised and a little hurt when he refused the former. As a
member of a religious community he could not hold preferment, and he had
no vocation to settled Christianity.

"I shouldn't be at all good as a country clergyman. Besides, Jo"--he had
at once slipped into the brotherliness of their old relations--"I know
you; you wouldn't like my ways. You'd always be up at me, teaching me
better, and then I should be up at you, and possibly we shouldn't stay
quite such good friends as we are now."

"I shouldn't mind your ways. Reckon it might do the folks round here a
proper lot of good to be prayed over same as you--I mean I'd like to see
a few of 'em prayed over when they were dying and couldn't help
themselves. Serve them right, I say, for not praying when they're alive,
and some who won't put their noses in church except for a harvest
thanksgiving. No, if you'll only come here, Lawrence, you may do what
you like in the way of prayers and such. I shan't interfere as long