V Reaping
VI Threshing
VII Garnered Grain

Epilogue




BOOK I

SOWING




SECRET BREAD

PROLOGUE


There was silence in the room where James Ruan lay in the great bed,
awaiting his marriage and his death--a silence so hushed that it was not
broken, only faintly stirred, by the knocking of a fitful wind at the
casement, and the occasional collapse of the glowing embers on the
hearth. The firelight flickered over the whitewashed walls, which were
dimmed to a pearly greyness by the stronger light without; the sick
man's face was deep in shadow under the bed canopy, but one full-veined
hand showed dark upon the blue and white check of the counterpane. All
life, both without and within, was dying life--waning day at the