ONE:Reuben was glad to escape into his farm work. The atmosphere of sickness was like a cloud, which grew blacker and blacker the nearer one came to its heart. Its heart was that little room in the gable, where he spent those wretched nights, disturbed by Harry's moaning. Out of doors, in the yard or the cowshed or the stable, he breathed a cleaner atmosphere. The heaviness, the vague remorse, grew lighter. And strange to say, out on Boarzell, which was the cause of his trouble, they grew lightest of all.
TWO:The year passed, and the new year came, showing the farm still on the upward struggle, with everyone hard at work, and no one, except Reuben, enjoying it particularly. Luck again favoured Odiamthe lambing of that spring was the best for years, and as the days grew longer the furrows bloomed with tender green sproutings, and hopes of another good harvest ran high.
TWO:He drank in the heat and stuffiness of the little room as a man might drink water in a desert, not knowing when the next well should be. He loved it, even to the smoke-stains on the sagging rafters, to the faint smell of onions that pervaded it all.
TWO:Caro watched the year bud and flowerMay came and creamed the hedges with blossom and rusted the grass with the first heats. Then June whitened the fields with big moon-daisies and frothed the banks with chervil and fennel. The evenings were tender, languorous, steeped in the scent of hay. They hurt Caro with their sweetness, so that she scarcely dared lift her eyes to the purpling twilight sky, or breathe the wind that swept up heavy with hay and roses from the fields. July did nothing to heal herits yellow, heat-throbbing dawns smote her with despairits noons were a long-drawn ache, and when in the evening hay and dust and drooping chervil troubled the air with shreds and ghosts of scent, something almost akin to madness would twist her heart."Malmsey! and in a villein's cottage," replied Holgrave, bitterly. "No, no; but here is a small flask of sack which a neighbour brought to my wife: she will little grudge it to a man in your plight."
