However, Sam was not an imaginative man, and since the house shone with cleanliness such as it had never known, the shining not of mere scouring, but of the fine gloss only attained by loving care, he did not trouble his head. Women were queer at the best of times, and besides, a few months after the marriage, reason for any additional queerness on the part of Senath became known to him. After she had told him the news, Sam, ever inarticulate, but moved to the rarely felt depths of his nature, went out into a field that was getting its autumn ploughing, and his heart sang as he guided the horses down the furrow. Even as he was doing now, and his father had done before him, so should his son do after him, and the rich earth would turn over in just this lengthening wave at the blade of the ploughshare for future generations of Harveys yet to come. Like most men with any feeling for the land in them, Sam was sure his child must be a son. And to him, who had not hoped for such a thing in marrying Senath, to him this glory was coming. Everything seemed to him wonderful that day; the pearly pallor of the dappled sky; the rooks and screaming gulls that wheeled and dipped behind his plough; the bare swaying elms, where the rooks' nests clung like gigantic burrs. Dimly, and yet for him keenly, he was aware of all these things, as a part of a great phenomenon in which he held pride of place. When he came in, his way led through the yard, where a new farm-cart, just come home, stood under the shed in all the bravery of its blue body and vermilion wheels. Senath had crept round in the shed to the back and was studying the tailboard, one hand against it. "Looken to see all's well to the rear as to the front?" called Sam jovially. "That's a proper farmer's wife." Senath started violently and dropped her hand, looking away before she did so. "It looks fine," was all she said, and went within doors, passing him. A small portent, so slight Sam did not even know it for what it was, and yet something in her look and manner seemed to chill him to the bones of him. Then, and after, he put anything unfathomable in her ways down to her condition, and so turned what might have been a source of discomfort to the account of his joy.