“No!” Edgar pursed up his lips. “I can’t say she’s much in my line.” He mused a little. Then: “But why do you call her ‘Nevermore’?” he asked.

“Well,” said Paul, “if she looks at a man she says haughtily ‘Nevermore,’ and if she looks at herself in the looking-glass she says disdainfully ‘Nevermore,’ and if she thinks back she says it in disgust, and if she looks forward she says it cynically.”

Edgar considered this speech, failed to make much out of it, and said, laughing:

“You think she’s a man-hater?”

“She thinks she is,” replied Paul.

“But you don’t think so?”

“No,” replied Paul.

“Wasn’t she nice with you, then?”

“Could you imagine her nice with anybody?” asked the young man.

Edgar laughed. Together they unloaded the coal in the yard. Paul was rather self-conscious, because he knew Clara could see if she looked out of the window. She didn’t look.

On Saturday afternoons the horses were brushed down and groomed. Paul and Edgar worked together, sneezing with the dust that came from the pelts of Jimmy and Flower.

“Do you know a new song to teach me?” said Edgar.

He continued to work all the time. The back of his neck was sun-red when he bent down, and his fingers that held the brush were thick. Paul watched him sometimes.

“‘Mary Morrison’?”eg suggested the younger.

Edgar agreed. He had a good tenor voice, and he loved to learn all the songs his friend could teach him, so that he could sing whilst he was carting. Paul had a very indifferent baritone voice, but a good ear. However, he sang softly, for fear of Clara. Edgar repeated the line in a clear tenor. At times they both broke off to sneeze, and first one, then the other, abused his horse.

Miriam was impatient of men. It took so little to amuse them—even Paul. She thought it anomalous in him that he could be so thoroughly absorbed in a triviality.

It was tea-time when they had finished.

“What song was that?” asked Miriam.

Edgar told her. The conversation turned to singing.

“We have such jolly times,” Miriam said to Clara.

Mrs. Dawes ate her meal in a slow, dignified way. Whenever the men were present she grew distant.

“Do you like singing?” Miriam asked her.

“If it is good,” she said.

Paul, of course, coloured.

“You mean if it is high-class and trained?” he said.

“I think a voice needs training before the singing is anything,” she said.

“You might as well insist on having people’s voices trained before you allowed them to talk,” he replied. “Really, people sing for their own pleasure, as a rule.”

“And it may be for other people’s discomfort.”

“Then the other people should have flaps to their ears,” he replied.

The boys laughed. There was a silence. He flushed deeply, and ate in silence.

After tea, when all the men had gone but Paul, Mrs. Leivers said to Clara:

“And you find life happier now?”

“Infinitely.”

“And you are satisfied?”

“So long as I can be free and independent.”

“And you don’t miss anything in your life?” asked Mrs. Leivers gently.

“I’ve put all that behind me.”

Paul had been feeling uncomfortable during this discourse. He got up.

“You’ll find you’re always tumbling over the things you’ve put behind you,” he said. Then he took his departure to the cow-sheds. He felt he had been witty, and his manly pride was high. He whistled as he went down the brick track.

Miriam came for him a little later to know if he would go with Clara and her for a walk. They set off down to Strelley Mill Farm. As they were going beside the brook, on the Willey Water side, looking through the brake at the edge of the wood, where pink campions glowed under a few sunbeams, they saw, beyond the tree-trunks and the thin hazel bushes, a man leading a great bay horse through the gullies. The big red beast seemed to dance romantically through that dimness of green hazel drift, away there where the air was shadowy, as if it were in the past, among the fading bluebells that might have bloomed for Deirdre or Iseult.10

The three stood charmed.

“What a treat to be a knight,” he said, “and to have a pavilioneh here.”

“And to have us shut up safely?” replied Clara.

“Yes,” he answered, “singing with your maids at your broidery. I would carry your banner of white and green and heliotrope. I would have ‘W.S.P.U.’ei emblazoned on my shield, beneath a woman rampant.”

“I have no doubt,” said Clara, “that you would much rather fight for a woman than let her fight for herself.”

“I would. When she fights for