Perhaps it was the memory of the frost and the sow who fell a victim to it; at all events, she went round to the piggeries, taking a stick from the bristling fagot stack on the way. It had always been one of her recreations to stand over the sty and scratch the great rough backs of the animals. She did it now, rubbing the stick insinuatingly up and down, across and across, and almost fancying that the thick grunts held meaning, and that there were appreciation, friendliness, and compassion in the small, slitlike eyes that looked up at her. Then, restless and idle, she went round again to the garden and stood staring stupidly at the red, newly graveled paths and the glass of the new greenhouse. She could see Daborn inside pricking out seedlings into boxes. There was a weedy patch--the one weedy patch--in a corner of the garden. She fetched the spud and began to dig for dandelion-roots. She had almost forgotten that she made dandelion-tea every spring and insisted on Jethro taking a cup in the morning to clear his liver. She took them up, transferring them from her knotted, earth-caked hand to her apron. She meant to take them back to the house, wash them, cut them up, and infuse them in water for a certain number of hours. But halfway along the path she stopped blankly, a sudden thought dismaying her. Pamela would not let her make the tea. Scalding childish tears rose in her eyes. She felt sure she would not be allowed to make the dandelion-tea. She went stumblingly back to the weed-grown patch and let the roots drop in a little hill from her apron to the ground. Then she looked up, and saw old Chalcraft, who was beginning to trench up the farther end. He was leaning idly on his spade, watching her with affectionate solicitude. There was a little suspicion mixed with his compassion; your true rustic is always distrustful of what he doesn’t understand. She, standing there idle, vacant, with a still tongue, was a mystery. He didn’t know what blighting thing had touched and turned her. She stood there stupidly, dead to the familiar sounds on the farm--the excited cluck of laying hens, two cocks crowing in rivalry, the weak bleat of very early lambs in the fold, and the yapping of puppies in the barn. She didn’t hear the steady break of stones in the road, nor the song of a lark as it rose from the neighboring field. The weedy patch had last year been sown with beet. Sparrows had eaten it--beet on that soil being, with carrots and spinach, a chance crop. Chalcraft was digging the weeds in and preparing to make a second sowing of broad beans. Pamela had not yet brought her reforming intellect to bear on the kitchen-garden; she thought vegetables very uninteresting.