He went out presently, in the slanting sunlight, to look at some beasts he had on the rough ground below his fields, and the dog followed. Among the young bracken and the furze not yet in bloom again, he sat down on a stone. The afternoon was glorious beyond all words, now that the sun was low, and its glamour had motion, as it were, and flight across the ash-trees, the hawthorn, and the fern. One may-tree close beside him was still freakishly in delicate flower, with a sweet and heavy scent; in the hedge the round cream-coloured heads of the elder-flower flashed, flat against the glistening air, while the rowans up the gulley were passing already from blossom towards the brown unrounded berries. There was all the magic of transition from season to season, even in the song of the cuckoo, which flighted arrow-like to a thorn-tree up the rocky dingle, and started a shrill calling. Bowden counted his beasts, and marked the fine sheen on their red coats. He was drowsy from his hot day, from the cider he had drunk, and the hum of the flies in the fern. Unconsciously he enjoyed a deep and sensuous peace of warmth and beauty. Ned had said there was no green out there. It was unimaginable! No green--not the keep of a rabbit; not a curling young caterpillar-frond of fern; no green tree for a bird to light on! And Steer had sent him out there! Through his drowsiness that thought came flapping its black wings. Steer! Who had no son to fight, who was making money hand over fist. It seemed to Bowden that a malevolent fortune protected that stingy chap, who couldn’t even take his glass. There were little blue flowers, speedwell and milkwort, growing plentifully in the rough grass around; Bowden noted, perhaps for the first time, those small flower luxuries of which Steer had deprived his son by sending him to where no grass grew. He rose at length, retracing his slow-lifted tread up the lane, deep-soiled with the dried dung of his cows, where innumerable gnats danced level with the elder-blossom and the ash leaves. The village postman was leaving the yard when Bowden entered it. The man stopped in the doorway, and turned his bearded face and dark eyes blinking in the level sunlight. “There’s a talegram for yu, Mist Bowden,” he said, and vanished. “What’s that?” said Bowden dully, and passed in under the porch. The ‘talegram’ lay unopened on the kitchen table, and Bowden stared at it. Very few such missives had come his way, perhaps not half a dozen in his fifty odd years. He took it up, handling it rather as he might have handled a fowl that would peck, and broke it open with his thumb. “Greatly regret inform you your son killed in action on seventh instant. War Office.” He read it through again and again, before he sat down heavily, dropping it on the table. His round solid face looked still and blind, its mouth just a little open. The girl Pansy came up and stood beside him. “Here!” he said, “read that.”