“You’re a bit shaky, likely,” Thomas said, dumping the bundle on the nearest chair. He blinked his eyes a moment because of the sun, and then he began to look about for his wife. He couldn’t persuade himself at first that she wasn’t there, because this was the great moment of which she had talked. He had almost expected to meet her in the field, or at least to discover her waving from the porch. Failing that, they would find her when they got inside, ready with welcome for a tired old man. Here they were, however, at the journey’s end, only to find her vanished off the earth. Not only was she not in the kitchen as he had thought, but he had a terrible feeling that she wasn’t even in the house. There was no stir in the air of the kitchen as though somebody had just run out. The silence of it was settled and whole, and seemed to flow away into unstirred deeps beyond. Just for a moment he felt his old loneliness crush back, thinking her shut away from him where he could not go. Then he roused himself and went to the stair and called, and Kit stopped staring at the flag and shuffled into the room. There he stood and waited, as he had learned to wait, with his careless-careful fingers clasping fiddle and bow. The kitchen still seemed dim and rather strange, and nothing spoke to him out of it that he knew. The sun sent pointers of light across the room, picking out tables and chairs he had never seen. Thomas shouted and said she wouldn’t be far; and shouted again and said she wouldn’t be long. This sudden check at the very start seemed to have thrown all their pleasant planning out of gear. The great occasion couldn’t begin until Agnes was in place, and as far as he could discover she was gone for good. He thought, as he waited and fretted, that things were going amiss ... right from the earliest moment they were going amiss.... He said over and over again that she wouldn’t be far, just as Kit had repeated his speech about the flag. They were like helpless, stranded actors dropping cues that there was nobody left in the theatre to pick up. Then Thomas bellowed again in the midst of a last excuse, and they heard a door fling open above them and afterwards slam. There was a running and flutter and clatter on the stair, and Agnes came flying past him into the room. She went straight across to the guest and took his hand, her face warm with welcoming smiles, and her voice full of self-reproach. “Eh, now, to think I missed you after all!” she said; “an’ me that set on being on the spot! I never thought you’d catch me unbeknownst. I was nobbut giving a look to things upstairs.... Ay, well, you’re welcome, I’m sure ... you are that. We’re right glad, Thomas and me, to have you come....”