The great field, all glittering green save for the brown strip which testified to recent labours, stretched away for many goodly acres. On a lesser slope beneath he could see the roofs of Littlecomb Farm and its appurtenances, but the sight of the amber and ruddy outlines awakened in him now no feeling of repulsion. During the past weeks he had laughed himself out of his whilom fancy for the fascinating and disappointing widow; he had even taken himself to task somewhat severely for his strictures on that unconscious young woman. Was it her fault, after all, that her outer parts belied her real self? Why had he been so unreasonably angry because she had failed to correspond to the high estimate which he had formed on slight and inadequate premises? She was a very beautiful creature, and, no doubt, good enough in her way; if she was common-place, and had a sharp eye for the main chance, she would make the better wife to a practical farmer. He would in all probability get on well enough with her when she became his aunt, but meanwhile life was too full of congenial work and ever-growing interest to admit of his wasting time in improving his acquaintance with the future Mrs. Sharpe. He had thrown himself into his new pursuits with characteristic energy, and found them daily more and more engrossing. He possessed a gift not often to be met with in the cultivator of the soil—a love of Nature for her own sake—a sympathy with her moods, not from the practical, but from the poetical standpoint. Clouds and sunlight, frosts and dew, meant more to him than to his brother-toiler; the very odour of the damp earth, the fragrance of the bursting buds in copse and hedgerow, of the crushed herbage beneath his feet, intoxicated him. The homely thud of the horses’ hoofs as they trod the furrow, the ripping up of the green sod as he drove the plough through it, the mere consciousness of his own vigour and life and manhood dominating this solitude, filled him with a kind of ecstasy. ‘This is what I want,’ he had said to himself over and over again that morning; ‘this is what I have always wanted!’