ht bustle,
Ellesborough said to Rachel, in a voice no longer meant for the table,--

"Could you spare me a letter sometimes, Miss Henderson--at the front?"

He had both elbows on the table, and was playing with a cigarette. There
was nothing the least patronizing or arrogant in his manner. But there
was a male note in it--perhaps a touch of self-confidence--which
ruffled her.

"Oh, I am a bad letter-writer," she said, as she got up from the table.
"Shall we go and look at the cows?"

They all went out into the warm September night. Ellesborough followed
Rachel, cigarette in hand, his strong mouth twisting a little. The night
was almost cloudless. The pale encircling down, patched at intervals with
dark hanging woods, lay quiet under a sky full of faint stars. The scent
of the stubblefields, of the great corn-stack just beyond the farmyard,
of the big barn so full that the wide wooden doors could not be closed,
was mingled with the strong ammonia smells of the farm-yard, and here
and there with the sweetness left in the evening air by the chewing cows
on their passage to the cow-house on the farther side of the yard.

Rachel led the way to the cow-house--a vast fifteenth-century barn, with
an interlacing forest of timber in its roof, where the six cows stood
ranged, while Janet and the two land lassies, with Hastings the bailiff
to help them, were changing the litter and filling up the racks with hay.
Rachel went along the line pointing out the beauties of each separate
beast to Ellesborough, and caressing two little calves whom Jenny was
feeding by hand. Ellesborough was amused by her technical talk and her
proprietor's airs. It seemed to him a kind of play-acting, but it
fascinated him. Janet had brought in a lantern, and the light and shade
of it seemed to have been specially devised to bring into relief Rachel's
round and tempting beauty, the bright brown of her hair where it curled
on the temples, and the lovely oval of the cheeks. Ellesborough watched
her, now passing into deep shadow, and now brilliantly lit up, as the
light of the lantern caught her; overhead, the criss-cross of the arching
beams as of some primitive cathedral, centuries old; and on either side
the dim forms of the munching cattle, and the pretty movements of the
girls busy with their work.

"Take care," laughed Rachel as she passed him. "There are horrid holes in
this floor. I haven't had time to mend them."

As she spoke, she slipped and