They met on the further side of the fir clump, on the edge of Grandturzel's inclosure. Here Tilly would sit under a gorse-bush with her sewing, while young Realf lay along the grass at her feet. They did not talk much, for Tilly was busy, and generally had her mouth full of pins; but Realf's manhood worshipped her as she sat there, her delicious head bowed, and stains of sunshine, with sprinkled gorse-petals, in her hair. He loved her little determined chin, and the sweet smudge of freckles on her nose. Love filled their simplest actions, kindled their simplest words; it dreamed in their eyes and laughed on their lips; its silences linked them closer than the most passionate embraces. Both unconsciously dreaded the time when they should demand more of each other--when the occasional enlacing of their hands would no longer be enough to open Paradise, when from sweet looking and longing they would have to pass into the bitterness of action. Tilly, though essentially practical and determined, was enjoying her first visit to faery, and also inherited her mother's gift of languor. She basked in those hours of sun and bees. She, like her father, was passing for the first time into a life outside the dominion of the farm--but, whereas he fought it, and sought it only to fight it, she submitted to it as to a caress. She cared nothing for Odiam; it was no thought of disloyalty to it and her father, of breaking from her service, which made her mark time in dreams. As the weeks went by she felt more and more the hatefulness of the yoke. She now had a standard of comparison by which to judge Reuben and Odiam. She saw herself and her brothers and her sister more and more as victims. Other farmers' children were not slaves. Other farms did not hang like sucking incubuses on boys' and girls' backs, draining all the youth and joy and sport out of them. It made her blood boil to think of Robert and Albert in their exile. Robert had now been released from gaol, and had been sent by a charitable society to Australia. Reuben had refused to move a hand to help him. As for Albert, a few months ago a piteous letter had arrived, begging for money. He had, through Mr. Hedges, found work on a small Radical paper which soon came to grief, and since then had been practically starving, having had no success as a freelance. A friend of his wanted to start a weekly review--Tory this time, for Albert's politics were subservient to occasion--and only required funds. Did Reuben feel prepared to make an investment? Thus poor Albert cloaked and trimmed his begging. Of course Reuben had refused to help him, and Tilly had been unable to get any money out of Pete. Her heart bled for her brothers, and at the same time she could not help envying their freedom, though one enjoyed it as a beggar and the other as a felon. § 11.