It was August, and already the sun beat out again, fierce and strong.
The bright drops that gemmed the tamarisk-bushes above the wall of the
town-place were already fading under its heat; and I heard the voices
of the harvesters up the lane, as they returned to the oat-field
whence the storm had routed them. A bright parallelogram stretched
from the window across the white kitchen-table, and reached the dim
hollow of the open fire-place. Mrs. Bolverson drew the towel-horse, on
which my coat was stretched, between it and the wood fire, which (as
she held) the sunshine would put out.

"It's uncommonly kind of you, Mrs. Bolverson," said I, as she turned
one sleeve of the coat towards the heat. "To be sure, if the women in
these parts would speak out, some of them have done more than that for
the men with an old coat."

She dropped the sleeve, faced round, and eyed me.

"What do you know of that?" she asked slowly, and as if her chest
tightened over the words. She was a woman of fifty and more, of fine
figure but a worn face. Her chief surviving beauty was a pile of light
golden hair, still lustrous as a girl's. But her blue eyes--though now
they narrowed on me suspiciously--must have looked out magnificently
in their day.

"I fancy," said I, meeting them frankly enough, "that what you know
and I don't on that matter would make a good deal."

She laughed harshly, almost savagely.

"You'd better ask Sarah Gedye, across the coombe. She buried a man's