ONE:Supper was a very gay mealthe gayest there had ever been at Odiam. Rose laughed and talked, as at Starvecrow, and soon her husband and the boys were laughing with her. Some of the things she said were rather daring, and Caro had only a dim idea of what she meant, but Rose's eyes rolling mischievously under the long lashes, and the tip of her tongue showing between her lips, gave her words a devilish bite even if only half understood. Somehow the whole atmosphere of the Odiam kitchen was changedit was like the lifting of a curtain, the glimpsing of a life where all was gay, where love and ambition and all solemn things were the stuff of laughter.
THREE:For a moment Naomi stood stockish, conscious only of two sensations in her bodythe taste of cream on her lips, and a little cold place at the back of her neck.[Pg 68] She began to tremble, then suddenly the colour left her cheeks, for in the doorway of the wash-house, three yards off, stood Harry.
THREE:She began to laughshe became gay and mettlesome. Her whole nature seemed changed, and he found it hard to think of her as the beautiful yet rather lumpish girl who had sat in the silence of a good appetite at the Cheat Land supper-table. Behind them the ruin of the old cottage sent out bitter-sweet scents of decayits crumbling plaster and rotting lath perfumed the night. Fragrances strove in the airthe scent of Rose's clothes,[Pg 249] and of her big curls tumbling on his shoulder, the scent of still water, of dew-drenched leaves, and damp, teeming soilsweet vagabond scents of bluebells, puffed on sudden breezes....Should you leave me too, O my faithless ladie!"
THREE:So now was it strange that clashing with his sorrow, and his regretful love for one who, if he had never truly loved him, had always treated him with generosity and kindness, there should be a soaring sense of freedom and relief?a consciousness of standing on the edge of a boundless plain after years of confinement within walls? For Reuben was master now. Odiam was hisand the future of Odiam. He could follow his own will, he could take up that challenge which Boarzell Moor had flung him five years ago, when he fought and was flogged because he loved the red gaping clay between the gorse-stumps.
