smallest sense, any woman's lover. He had taken what he wanted of them
in a kind of animal semi-consciousness that amounted to a stark
innocence. Virility, he felt, was not of his seeking. There it was, and
it must be satisfied. Now he was annoyed to find that he felt guilty
when he remembered these women, and that he wanted Hazel, not, as with
them, occasionally, but all the time. He had been accustomed to say at
farmers' dinners, after indulging pretty freely:

'Oh, damn it! what d'you want with women between sun-up and sun-down?'
His coarseness had been received with laughter and reproof. Now he felt
that the reproof was juster than the laughter. It was curious, too, how
dull things became when Hazel was not there. Hazel had something fresh
to say about everything, and their quarrels were the most invigorating
moments he had known. Hazel was primitive enough to be feminine,
original enough to be boyish, and mysterious enough to be exciting. As
Vessons remarked to the drake, 'Oh, maister! you ne'er saw the like.
It's 'Azel, 'Azel, 'Azel the day long, and a good man spoilt as was
only part spoilt afore.'

Vessons and Hazel were spending the afternoon quarrelling about the
bees. When Reddin was away, Hazel put off her new dignity and was
Vessons' equal, because it was so dull to be anything else. Vessons
tolerated her presence for the sake of the subacid remarks it enabled
him to make, but chiefly because of the sardonic pleasure it gave him
to remember how soon his resolve would be put into action.

They were in the walled garden, and the bees were coming and going so
fast that they made, when Hazel half closed her eyes, long black
threads swaying between the hive doors and the distant fields and the
hill-top. They hung in cones on the low front walls, and lumped on the