He turned his head as he spoke, and tried to look through the hedge, and it was west and not east of them where the Hall lay that he looked. Here in the lane, as in the yard, he seemed to hear a fiddle that was dumb, thin and trembling and clear from the edge of the sea. Standing outside the dance he had heard the two musics mingle and clash, and had turned from the sound in the hot room to the sound that drew over miles from the cool tide. “What fetched _you_ out?” he asked of her, in his turn. They had stopped in the road as if at some word of command, and the swinging curves of the lane went winding before and behind, shutting them in together this way and hiding them safe together that. The sun, level on the fields as if smoothed by a hand, was below the thick barrier of the mounted hedge. Only through chinks or the eye of a gate could it find a way, to lie in patches on the hedgerow grass, or splash its pools on the heavily-rutted road. It was more restful than sleep in that cleft between the fields, where the roses, sprayed overhead, took a richer colour against the sky. There was green upon green on the background of dark wood—bramble and hazel, convolvulus and thorn. There were yellow and purple and white sweet peeping faces in the grass; ferns, emerald-fresh, stately in thick groups. And close in the hedge-side, where all else was new, lingered the old dead beech leaves of the year before, waiting for this year’s leaves to drift there, too.... Already, though the clippings were barely through, folk were getting to work at the hay. Away, as the land rose fast, they could see a cutter at work, and the flash of the horses’ sides as they turned in the sun. The sound of the cutter made sweeter their solitude and peace, yet the voice of it in the silence loosened their difficult tongues. “I reckon I’ve made up my mind now,” Agnes said, facing him sturdily as he looked away. “Likely I’ve lost you wi’ keeping you hanging round so long. It’s nowt to wonder at if you’re tired, I’m sure. But if you’re still set on our getting wed, there’s nowt as I can see agen putting up the banns....