gured in the light, the wind
blowing her beautiful hair about her.

"May I come and see you?" he asked, rather formally.

She smiled assent.

"Next week _everything_ will be in, and some of it threshed. I shall be
freer then. You'll like our place."

He pressed her hand, and she was off, running like a fawn after the
retreating pony carriage.

He turned away, a little dazzled and shaken. The image of her on the
ridge remained; but what perhaps had struck deepest had been the
sweetness of her as she hung above the injured boy. He went slowly
towards the camp, conscious that the day now departing had opened a new
door in the House of Life.

IV

Ellesborough allowed a week to pass before making the call at Great End
he had arranged with Rachel. But at last, when he thought that her
harvesting would be really over, he set out on his motor bicycle, one
fine evening, as soon as work at the camp was over. According to summer
time it was about seven o'clock, and the sun was still sailing clear
above the western woods.

Part of his way lay over a broad common chequered with fine trees and
groups of trees, some of them of great age; for the rest he ran through a
world where harvest in its latest stages was still the governing fact. In
some fields the corn was being threshed on the spot, without waiting for
the stacks; in others, the last loads were being led; and everywhere in
the cleared fields there were scattered figures of gleaners, casting long
shadows on the gold and purple carpet of the stubble. For Ellesborough
the novelty of this garden England, so elaborately combed and finished in
comparison with his own country, was by no means exhausted. There were
times when the cottage gardens, the endless hedge-rows, and miniature
plantations pleased him like the detail in those early Florentine
pictures in the Metropolitan Museum, for which, business man as he was,
and accustomed to the wilds, he had once or twice, on visits to New York,
discovered in himself a considerable taste. He was a man, indeed, of many
aptitudes, and of a loyal and affectionate temper. His father, a country
doctor, now growing old, his mother, still pretty at sixty, and his two
unmarried sisters were all very dear to him. He wrote to them constantly,
and received many letters from them. They belonged to one of the old
Unitarian stocks still common in New England; and such stocks are
generally conspicuous for high standards and clean livi