m the
ramparts, heavy and clear, like melted glass.

She climbed up and up through the water and round behind the fortress to
the street at the top. She could see the thin tower break and lean
forward like a red crane above the houses. She had to get to the top
before the street fell down. John was shut up in the last house. She ran
under the tower as it fell.

The house stood still, straight and tall. John was lying in the dark room
behind the closed shutters. He wanted her. She could hear him calling to
her "Jeanne! Jeanne!" She couldn't see in. She couldn't open the door.

"Jeanne!"

The wall split off and leaned forward.

She woke suddenly to the tapping and splashing of the rain.

V

Feeding time and milking time were done; in his jutting room over the
door-place John was washing and dressing for Sunday evening. He called
out to her through his window, "Go up to our seat and wait for me there."

He had come back again, suddenly, that morning, a day before they had
expected him.

Charlotte came out of the hot field into the cool room of the beech ring.
She sniffed up the clean, sharp smell of sap from the rough seat that she
and John had put up there, sawing and hacking and hammering all Sunday
afternoon. Every evening when the farm work was done they would sit there
together, inside the round screen of the beeches.

The farm people wouldn't disturb them; not even Mr. Burton, now, looking
in, smiling the fat, benevolent smile that blessed them, and going away;
the very calves were so well used to them that they had left off pushing
their noses through the tree trunks and staring.

John's window faced her where she sat; she could see his head passing and
passing across the black window space. To her sharp, waiting soul Barrow
Farm took on a sudden poignant and foreign beauty. The house was yellow
where the rain had soaked it, gold yellow like a sun-struck southern
house, under the black plume of the firs, a yellow that made the sky's
blue solid and thick. The grass, bright green after the rain, stretched
with the tight smoothness of velvet over the slopes and ridges of the
field. A stripe of darker green, where their feet had trodden down the
blades, led straight as a sheep's track from the garden gate to the
opening of the ring.

To think that she had dreamed bad dreams in a place like this. She
thought: "There must be something wrong about me, anyhow, to dream bad
dreams about John."

John