Although Malory had never, so far as I could remember, given me any description of Westmacott’s farm, whether of impression or detail, I recognised the place as soon as I had emerged from a little wood and had seen it lying in a hollow across the ploughed field, a connecting road which was little more than a cart-track running from it at right angles into the neat lane beyond. I recognised the farm-house, of creamy plaster heavily striped by gray oak beams, its upper story slightly overhanging, and supported on rounded corbels of the same bleached oak, rough-hewn. I was prepared to see, as I actually saw, the large barn of black, tarred weather-boarding, terminated by the two rounded oast-houses, and should have missed it had I not found it there. And I knocked, and the sense of reality still failed to return to me. Some one opened the door. I saw a young woman in a blue linen dress, with a child in her arms, and other children clinging about her skirts. My first impression was of astonishment at her beauty; Malory had led me to expect a subtle and languorous seduction, but I was not prepared for such actual beauty as I now found in her face. “Are you Mrs. Westmacott?” I asked. “Yes, sir,” she said, “are you the gentleman that’s stopping with father?” “I see you know about me.” “Yes, sir; mother was over yesterday, and said you’d likely be coming. Won’t you come in, sir? if you’ll excuse the children. There’s only me to look after them to-day.” I went into a clean and commonplace kitchen, and Ruth wiped a chair for me with her skirt, and put the baby into its cradle. She then sat down beside it, and with her foot kept the cradle moving on its rockers. I glanced round, and on the window-sill, among the pots of red geranium, I espied a wire cage with some little mice huddled in a corner. “Mrs. Westmacott,” I said, feeling that the beginning of the conversation rested with me, “you and I are quite old friends though you may not know it.” I hated myself for my jocularity. “You remember Mr. Malory? He has spoken to me about his life here, and about you.” I was looking at her; I saw that marvellous, that red rose blush of which Malory had spoken, come up under her skin till her cheek was like the rounded beauty of a nectarine. And I wondered, as I had wondered before; I wondered.... “And what news have you of Mr. Malory?” she asked. “None,” I said. “I thought perhaps you might have heard.” “I? If Mr. Malory was to write at all, would he not have written to you? Why should he write to me?” “I hope,” I said, “that nothing has happened to him.” She had answered me before I had finished speaking. “Nothing has happened to him.” “Why,” I said surprised, “how are you so certain?” She looked suddenly trapped and angry.