Meanwhile, the vicar, like a wise man, was securing the position with Janet. What he wished, what he was really driving at, he would not let himself inquire. What he _knew_ was that no woman had ever fluttered his quiet mind as Miss Henderson had fluttered it during these summer weeks. To watch her, erect and graceful, "pitching" the sheaves on to the harvest cart, where he and a labourer received and packed them; to be privileged to lead the full cart home, with her smile and thanks at the barn door for reward, or to stand with her while she proudly watched her new reaping machine, with the three fine horses abreast, sweeping round her biggest field, while the ripe sheaves fell beside it, as of old they fell beside the reapers that Hoephoestus wrought in gleaming gold on the shield of Achilles; and then perhaps to pay a last visit with her to the farm buildings in the warm dusk and watch the cattle coming in from the fields and the evening feed, and all the shutting up for the night after the long, hot, busy day: these things had lately made a veritable idyll of the vicar's life. He felt as though a hundred primitive sensations and emotions, that he had only talked of or read about before, had at last become real to him. Oxford memories revived. He actually felt a wish to look at his Virgil or Theocritus again, such as had never stirred in him since he had packed his Oxford books to send home, after the sobering announcement of his third class. After all, it seemed these old fellows knew something about the earth and its joys! So that a golden light lay over these past weeks. And in the midst of it stood the figure of a silent and--as far as he was concerned--rather difficult woman, without which there would have been no transfiguring light at all. He confessed to himself that she had never had much to say to him. But wherever she was she drew the male creature after her. There was no doubt as to that. She was a good employer--fair, considerate, intelligent; but it was the _woman_--so the vicar believed--who got her way. From which it will be seen that Miss Eleanor Shenstone had some reason for misgiving, and that the vicar's own peace of mind was in danger. His standards also were no longer what they were. He had really ceased to care that Miss Leighton was a Unitarian! "I suppose you have been horribly busy?" said Rachel to Ellesborough, when, thanks to the exertions of Janet and the two girls, everybody had been provided with a first course. "Not more than usual. Do you mean--" He looked at her, smiling, and Rachel's eyebrows went up slightly. "Ah, I see--you thought I had forgotten?" "Oh, no," she said indifferently. "It is a long way to come." He flushed a little. "That never occurred to me for a moment!" he said with emphasis. "But you said you would have finished with the harvest in a week. So I waited. I didn't want to be a nuisance."