He flushed the colour of her apron. What a fool he was!--and yet after all she would be bound to hear the truth sooner or later; he had only been beforehand. All the same he was surprised at himself. A sudden tide of anger went over him. "Sad fur them, I reckon, but not fur me. I'm well shut of them." "Don't you miss them at all?" "Naun particular. Robert he wur good and plodding-like, but you couldn't trust his stacking, and he'd be all nohow wud the horses--and Albert he'd shirk everything wotsumdever, he'd go off into dreams in the middle of killing a pig--surelye!" "But in themselves, I mean." "Wot's that--in themselves?" "Well, as boys, as sons, not as farm-servants." "I döan't never think of them that way. One's no good to me wudout t'other." Alice Jury said nothing, and Reuben began to feel vaguely uncomfortable. What queer eyes she had!--they seemed to bore into him like nails. He suddenly rose to his feet. "See here--I must be going." "But father won't be long now." "I'm sorry--I can't wait. I've a load of field-bean coming in. I'll be round agäun to-morrow." "What time?--and I'll promise father shall be here to see you." "About eleven, say. Good-bye, miss." "Good-bye." She went with him to the door. A great lump of phlox grew on either side of it. She stood between them, and suddenly pointed out over Jury's miserable little root-patch towards Boarzell, heaving its great hummocks against the east. "What's that?" she asked. § 8. Reuben came away from Cheat Land with odd feelings of annoyance, perplexity, and exhilaration. Alice Jury was queer, and she had insulted him, nevertheless those ten minutes spent with her had left him tingling all over with a strange excitement. He could not account for it. Women had excited him before, but merely physically. He took it for granted that they had minds and souls like men, but he had not thought much about that aspect of them or allowed it to enter his calculations. Of late he had scarcely troubled about women at all, having something better to think of. Now he found himself thrown into a kind of dazzle by Alice Jury. He could not explain it. Her personal beauty was negligible--"a liddle stick of a thing," he called her; their conversation had been limited almost entirely to her tactless questions and his forbearing answers. "She äun't my sort," he mumbled as he walked home, "she äun't at all my sort. Dudn't know where Odiam wur--never heard of Boarzell--oh, yes, seems as she remembered hearing something when I töald her"--and Reuben's lip curled ironically.