Jethro was flat on his back. He was so spare that his body seemed to curve inward; but it was the spareness of a tough, muscular man. His upper lip was bare and his eyes were keen, merry blue. A life of sunshine and wind and rain had tanned his skin. The backs of his hairy hands looked as if they had been steeped in tobacco juice; beyond his wrist, where his coat sleeve pushed up, his skin was milky. He wore an Oxford shirt with an unstarched collar. She saw a ring of milk-white skin when he turned his head to look at her, and immediately above it he was the color of delicate old leather. She looked at his handsome face and muscular body with interest. Well! It might be worse--or better. A little round table with a red and gold cloth was within touch. He put out his hand and touched a toppling pile of letters. “These were all answers,” he said, smiling drolly. “I had them addressed to Liddleshorn post-office, as you know. Three hundred and fifty. I shall get some more to-morrow morning, no doubt.” “Don’t!” she cried out sharply, “oh, don’t! It--it--it--a man doesn’t know.... A woman has little secret shames--you won’t understand.... I wish I hadn’t come. Three hundred and fifty girls! Oh! They are not coming here, too?” She stopped, panting. Her eyes were on those letters, letters in every shape and color, some with gilt monograms on the back, one with a gilt “Nell.” She looked at the handwriting, some blotted and some scrawling, some neatly masculine and clerk-like. Her face looked old, her eyes blistered with tears. Jethro struggled to rise. Then with a groan of pain and sharp twist of his injured leg he fell back on the cushions. Her back was firm against the carved walnut of the green-seated chair, as they sat in such strange conference in the deep shadow of the bay. Through the hot mist of her tears she saw the harvest field, half clipped, like the shorn head of beauty. A big brown fellow of a humble bee came through the open casement and settled on her. She flinched. Jethro regarded it as an omen. “When a humble bee flies in at the open window and lights on a stranger and flies out again, it’s a sign the stranger will not stay long,” he said, looking quite disturbed as the insect droned out into the sun again. She looked at him with mild contempt, thinking it most extraordinary that a big fellow such as he was should entertain such notions. There were the usual sounds of fully blown summer; petulant buzz of overworked insects, voices of harvesters, the whirr of the engine. Taps from the smithy at the corner intensified in Pamela’s aching head; ever afterward she regarded smithy sounds as indispensable to the perfection of an August day. Suddenly she broke out passionately: