Mary called up to him from the garden and suggested that they should go out and pick flowers, and, still in a dream, he climbed down from the wall and stood there nodding his head like a mandarin. He suffered himself to be led by Mary into the high-road, only stopping for a moment to whistle for Hamlet, who came running across the lawn as though he had just been shot out of a cannon. It can have been only because he was sunk so deep in his dream that he wandered, without knowing it, down over the beach, jumping the hill-stream that intersected it, up the sand, past the church, out along the road that led straight to the forbidden farm. Nor was Mary thinking of their direction. She was having one of her happy days, her straw hat on the back of her head, her glasses full of sunlight, her stockings wrinkled about her legs, walking, her head in the air, singing one of her strange tuneless chants that came to her when she was happy. There was a field on their right, and a break in the hedge. Through the break she saw buttercups—thousands of them—and loose-strife and snapdragons. She climbed the gate and vanished into the field. Jeremy walked on, scarcely realizing her absence. Suddenly he heard a scream. He stopped and Hamlet stopped, pricking up his ears. Another scream, then a succession, piercing and terrible. Then over the field gate Mary appeared, tumbling over regardless of all audiences and proprieties, then running, crying, “Jeremy! Jeremy! Jeremy!” buttercups scattering from her hand as she ran. Her face was one question-mark of terror; her hat was gone, her hair-ribbon dangling, her stockings about her ankles. All she could do was to cling to Jeremy crying, “Oh, oh, oh! . . . Ah, ah, ah!” “What is it?” he asked roughly, his fear for her making him impatient. “Was it a bull?” “No—no. . . . Oh, Jeremy! . . . Oh, dear, oh, dear! . . . The boys! . . . They hit me—pulled my hair!” “What boys?” But already he knew. Recovering a little, she told him. She had not been in the field a moment, and was bending down picking her first buttercups, when she felt herself violently seized from behind, her arms held; and, looking up, there were three boys standing there, all around her. Terrible, fierce boys, looking ever so wicked. They tore her hat off her head, pulled her hair, and told her to leave the field at once, never to come into it again, that it was _their_ field, and she’d better not forget it, and to tell all her beastly family that they’d better not forget it either, and that they’d be shot if they came in there. “Then they took me to the gate and pushed me over. They were very rough. I’ve got bruises.” She began to cry as the full horror of the event broke upon her. Jeremy’s anger was terrible to witness. He took her by the arm. “Come with me,” he said. He led her to the end of the road beyond the church. “Now you go home,” he said. “Don’t breathe a word to anyone till I get back.”