d an evening wind was gustily blowing through the cart-shed, playing
with some old guano sacks that had been left there, and whistling round
the corners of the house. Outside, Rachel could hear the horse fidgeting,
and old Jonathan coughing--no doubt as a signal to her that she had kept
him long enough.

Still, she sat bent together on the margin of the well. Then she drew off
her glove, and felt for something in the leather bag she carried on her
wrist. She took it out, and the small object sparkled a little as she
held it poised for a moment--as though considering. Then with a rapid
movement, she bent over the well, and dropped it into the water. There
was a slight splash.

Rachel Henderson raised herself and stood up.

"That's done with!" she said to herself, with a straightening of all her
young frame.

Yet all the way back to London she was tormented by thoughts of what she
had declared was "done with"; of scenes and persons, that is, which she
was determined to forget, and had just formally renounced for ever by her
symbolic action at the well.

II

"You do seem to have hit on a rather nice spot, Rachel, though lonesome,"
said Miss Henderson's friend and partner, Janet Leighton, as they stood
on the front steps of Great End Farm, surveying the scene outside, on an
August evening, about a week after she and Rachel had arrived with their
furniture and personal belongings to take possession of the farm.

During that week they had both worked hard--from dawn till dark, both
outside and in. The harvest was in full swing, and as the dusk was
filling, Janet Leighton, who had just returned herself from the fields,
could watch the scene going on in the wheat-field beyond the farm-yard,
where, as the reaping machine steadily pared away the remaining square of
wheat, two or three men and boys with guns lay in wait outside the square
for the rabbits as they bolted from their fast lessening shelter. The
gold and glow of harvest was on the fields and in the air. At last the
sun had come back to a sodden land, after weeks of cold and drenching
showers which, welcomed in June, had by the middle of August made all
England tremble for the final fate of the gorgeous crops then filling the
largest area ever tilled on British soil with their fat promise. Wheat,
oats, and barley stood once more erect, roots were saved, and the young
vicar of Ipscombe was reflecting as he walked towards Great End Farm that
his harvest fe