Rachel looked round with a look of annoyance.

"Oh, dear, what a bore," she said wearily. "I suppose I must go and tidy
up. Nobody ought to be allowed to pay visits after five o'clock."

"You asked him something about a village woman to help, didn't you?"

"I did, worse luck!" sighed Rachel, gathering up her sunbonnet and
disappearing from the window. Janet heard her go upstairs, and a hasty
opening of cupboards overhead. She herself had come back an hour earlier
from the fields than Rachel in order to get supper ready, and had slipped
a skirt over the khaki tunic and knickerbockers which were her dress--and
her partner's--when at work on the farm. She wondered mischievously what
Rachel would put on. That her character included an average dose of
vanity, the natural vanity of a handsome woman, Rachel's new friend was
well aware. But Janet, Rachel's elder by five years, was only tenderly
amused by it. All Rachel's foibles, as far as she knew them, were
pleasant to her. They were in that early stage of a new friendship when
all is glamour.

Yet Janet did sometimes reflect, "How little I really know about her. She
is a darling--but a mystery!"

They had met at college, taken their farm training together, and fallen
in love with each other. Janet had scarcely a relation in the world.
Rachel possessed, it seemed, a brother in Canada, another in South
Africa, and some cousins whom she scarcely knew, children of the uncle
who had left her three thousand pounds. Each had been attracted by the
loneliness of the other, and on leaving college nothing was more natural
than they should agree to set up together. Rachel, as the capitalist, was