Senath walked briskly along, a sturdy, full-chested figure, making, in her black clothes (Sunday-best, "come down"), the only dark note in the pale colours of early spring that held land and air. The young grass showed tender, the intricate webs made by the twisted twigs of the bare thorn-trees gleamed silvery. On the pale lopped branches of the elders, the first crumpled leaves were just beginning to unfold. The long grass in an orchard shone with the drifted stars of thousands of narcissi, which a faint breeze woke to a tremulous twinkling. The road was thick with velvety white dust, for it was some time since rain had fallen, and the black of Senath's skirt was soon powdered into greyness. As she went, she wondered what it was that gave the air such a tang of summer, until she suddenly realized it was the subtle but unmistakable smell of the dust that brought to her mind long, sunny days, when such a smell was as much part of the atmosphere as the foliage or the heat. Now there was still a chill in the air, but she hardly felt it in the force of that suggestiveness. "Sim' me I'm naught but a bit of stone like they Pipers," she said to herself, as she paused to look up at them, towering above her. Then a whimsical thought struck her. "I'll lave the Maidens be for a while and take my walk to the Pipers," she thought, "tes becoming enough in a woman o' my years, I should think." She smiled at her mild jest and plodded on to the farm. It was a fairly large house, with a roof still partly thatch, but mostly replaced by slate. In front of it, a trampled yard reached to the low wall of piled boulders and the road. Senath found the mistress of it leaning on the wall, ready to exchange a word with the occupants of the various market-carts as they drove homewards, and the business of the butter was soon transacted. Yet, for some odd reason, Senath was not anxious to take up her basket and go. Perhaps it was that touch of the unusual in the false hint of summer; perhaps, too, her decision to vary the course of her evening walk and the playmates of her imagination; but, whatever it was, she was vaguely aware of a prompting towards human contact. The two women sat on the low wall and chatted in a desultory fashion for a few minutes. Then the farmer's wife, shading her eyes with her hand, looked along the road. "Your eyes are younger'n mine, Senath Lear," she said. "Tell me, edn that Sam'l Harvey of Upper Farm comen in his trap?" Senath turned her clear, long-sighted eyes down the road and nodded. "He'll be driving out Manuel Harvey to the Farm," Mrs. Cotton went on. "You do knaw, or maybe your don't, seein' you live so quiet, that since Sam's been a widow-man, Upper Farm's too big for he to live in in comfort. He's comin' to live in church-town and look after his interests in building. You do knaw that he's putting up a row of cottages to let to they artisesses. And Upper Farm he's let to Manuel Harvey."