character of the labourer's daughter seemed to make a special appeal
to the delicate and mystical temper of the vicar's sister, in whom the
ardour of the "watcher for souls" was a natural gift. Jenny seemed to be
aware of it. She was flushed and a little excited, alternately shy and
communicative--like the bird under fascination, already alive to the
signal of its captor. At any rate, Margaret Shenstone kept both her
companions happy through the meal.

The vicar employed himself in vigorously making friends with Janet
Leighton, keenly alive all the time to that vivid and flower-like vision
of Miss Henderson at the farther end of the table. But some instinct
warned him that beside the splendid fellow in khaki his own claim on her
could be but a modest one. He must watch his opportunity. It was natural
that certain misgivings had already begun to rise in the mind of his
elder sister, Eleanor, who was his permanent companion and housekeeper at
the vicarage. For why should her brother be so specially assiduous in the
harvest operations at Great End? She was well aware that it was the right
and popular thing for the young clergy who were refused service at the
front to be seen in their shirt sleeves as agricultural volunteers, or in
some form of war work. A neighbouring curate in whom she was greatly
interested spent the greater part of his week, for instance, on munition
work at a national factory. She thought him a hero. But if it was to be
harvesting, then it seemed to her that her brother should have divided
his help more evenly among the farms of the village. She was afraid of
"talk." And it troubled her greatly that neither Miss Henderson nor Miss
Leighton came to church.

Meanwhile, the vicar, like a wise man, was securing the position with
Janet. What he wished, what he was really driving at, he would not let
himself inquire. What he _knew_ was that no woman had ever fluttered his
quiet mind as Miss Henderson had fluttered it during these summer weeks.
To watch her, erect and graceful, "pitching" the sheaves on to the
harvest cart, where he and a labourer received and packed them; to be
privileged to lead the full cart home, with her smile and thanks at the
barn door for reward, or to stand with her while she proudly watched her
new reaping machine, with the three fine horses abreast, sweeping round
her biggest field, while the ripe sheaves fell beside it, as of old they
fell beside the reapers that Hoephoestus wroug