felt like an intruder. I was afraid that Farmer Banks would treat me as
a distinguished visitor, and that my efforts to attain the happy freedom
of an equal might--in the eyes of Anne--appear condescending. The new self
I had so lately discovered was everybody's equal, but, just then, I was
out of touch with my new self.

Nor did Farmer Banks's natural courtesy tend to put me at ease. He and
Arthur were alone in the room when I came down and it was Arthur who, with
an evident self-consciousness, introduced me.

"Mr. Melhuish, father," was all he said, and I had no idea how much of the
story the old man had, as yet, been told.

He made a kind of stiff bow and held out his hand. "Pleased to meet you,
Mr. Melhuish," he said, and his manner struck a mean between
respectfulness and self-assertion. It was the kind of manner that he might
have shown to a titled canvasser just before an election.

He was a notably handsome man, tall and broad, with regular, impassive
features and blue eyes exactly the colour of Arthur's. Save that his back
was slightly rounded and that his closely-cropped hair was iron-gray, he
showed little mark of his sixty years. He seemed to me the very type of an
English yeoman, not markedly intelligent outside his own speciality, and
conservative to the point of fanaticism. When I thought of trying to
persuade him to forsake the usage of a lifetime and begin again in a
foreign country under new conditions, my heart failed me. Upstairs, before
the looking-glass, I had had my doubts of the possibility of ever ousting
the old Graham Melhuish; but those doubts appeared the most childish
exaggerations of difficulty when compared with my doubts of persuading the
man before me to alter his habits and his whole way of life. It seemed to
me that the spirit of Farmer Banks must be encrusted beyond all hope of
release.

I mumbled some politeness in answer to his unanswerable opening, and
started the one possible topic of the weather. I was grossly ignorant of
the general requirements of agriculture in that or any other connection,
but any one knows a farmer wants fine weather for harvest.

He took me up with a slightly exaggerated air of relief, and I dare say we
could have kept the subject going for ten minutes if it had been
necessary, but he had hardly begun his reply before the three women for
whom we had been waiting came into the room together.

When I met Mr. Banks I felt, at once, that I might have inf