hedge-grass as well as the honeysuckle boughs. “I doubt it’s over late for the farm,” Agnes murmured once. “Eh, if we could nobbut set the clock back a year!” “There’s a chance we might get it yet,” Thomas replied, but with the new caution he had learned from life. Self-confident Thomas had grown to be careful how he tempted fate. “The new man’s shaping badly, so they say....” She gave a little cry of excitement, and then sighed. “I don’t deserve it, I’m sure; but eh, Thomas, if we should! We’d make it the best spot anywheres about, and we’d have your father to live with us right off. We’d do our best to make up to him all we could....” But she had forgotten Kit once more when she found herself at her gate, and heard her lover’s step going from her down the lane. In her bedroom she watched the moon come up, over the road where they had walked, the patient moon that had not hurried or spied. Parts of the lane would be as bright as day where for their passing had been a velvet dusk. Folks who walked there now would have to whisper low, because voices carried so clearly under the moon. They would see their own shadows close about their feet, so that they would be four instead of two, and therefore never alone. Thomas and she had had no shadows at all, and even the shadows of their wasted years had been hidden by the night. They had got the farm, after all, but they had had another year to wait. The new tenant’s fate had hung in the balance for some time, and though, when the end came, it came short and sharp, there had been much to do before they could move in. The new tenant, who had never had time to become an old tenant, had yet contrived to occasion many repairs. They had had to furnish, of course, and that meant visits to sales, and hours of pondering in Witham shops. There was also her mother to settle with a decent hired girl. The old woman’s house was her own, and she had no notion of coming to the farm. “The old man’ll keep you stirring, as it is,” she said to her daughter, when the point was raised. “Young folks as is newly-wed don’t want old folks hanging round their necks. It’ll make you feel what you’ll come to, if it doesn’t do nowt else....”