.

Perhaps it was partly the pleasant spring weather that had such a
beneficial effect on Gwen's temper. She loved the early growing season
of the year, when every day was a little longer and lighter than the
last, and the bulbs were pushing up in the garden, and the hazel
catkins showering clouds of pollen in the lane, and the rooks cawing
and building in the clump of elms near the mill, and great flights of
screaming white sea-gulls, noisy, chattering jackdaws, and cheery,
whistling starlings flew all together in mixed flocks to feed on the
wolds. The morning walk to North Ditton across the heath, so bleak and
wretched in December, was a daily delight now the sun was glinting
over the sea and the gorse was in bud, and the stonechats, which had
vanished during the cold weather, were back among the boulders,
darting from stone to stone in short, jerky flight, with that sharp,
jarring cry which is the prelude to their sweeter spring note. The
moorland air at 8 a.m. was so fresh and pure and exhilarating that it
seemed to blow away all the cobwebs, and Gwen often felt inclined to
dance along the path for sheer joy of the sun and the wind, and the
birds and the countless green things that were rapidly showing their
heads through the brown skeletons of last autumn's heather and
bilberry. The thrill of springtime is a totally different sensation
from what we experience on even the most gorgeous day in October;
there is a message of hope in the air, a foretaste of the coming
summer, a glow of reawakened vitality, an exaltation half physical and
half spiritual, as every year nature tells us afresh in her own
fashion the miracle of the Resurrection.

Life was a busy round at the Parsonage. Winnie devoted each moment she
could spare to the garden and the hen-yard, and Gwen, who at present
had a craving for out-of-doors, lent a hand as often as she could. She
whistled and sang over her work as she transplanted forget-me-nots,
sowed seeds, or tidied up the rockery, and her stalwart arms made the
lawn mower fly.

"There's some advantage in growing!" she declared, as she trundled
away the wheelbarrow full of weeds. "My muscles have hardened since
last year. I'll wheel you back up the garden, Martin, if you like.
Tumble in!"

Gwen and Winnie had a great scheme between them of building a summer
house, and every Saturday they managed to get on a little with their
operations. There was a large pile of young felled trees in the yard