In the soft grey gown that the first of the cold demanded she walked with her arm through Reuben's up the Moor. Her bonnet was the colour of heather, tied with wide ribbons that accentuated the milkiness of her chin. Reuben wore his Sunday clothes--drab shorts and a sprigged waistcoat, and a wide-brimmed hat under which his face looked strangely handsome and dark. Harry shuffled along, clutching his brother's coat-sleeve to guide himself. Mrs. Backfield preferred to stay at home, and Reuben had not tried to make her come. All Peasmarsh went to the Fair. It was a recognised holiday. All farm work--except the most barely necessary--was put aside, and the ploughman and dairymaid rollicked with their betters. The road across Boarzell was dark with them, coming from all quarters--Playden, Iden, Beckley, Northiam, Bodiam--Old Turk's Farm, Baron's Grange, Corkwood, Kitchenhour--even from Blackbrook and Ethnam on the Kentish border. The tents and stalls were blocked as usual round the central crest of pines. It was all much as it had been five years ago on the day of the Riot. There was the outer fringe of strange dwellings--tents full of smoke and sprawling squalling children, tilt carts with soup-pots hanging from their axles over little fires, and gorgeously painted caravans which stood out aristocratically amidst the prevalent sacking. There was a jangle of voices--the soft Romany of the gipsies, the shriller cant of the pikers and half-breeds, the broad drawling Sussex of the natives. Head of all the Fair, and superintending the working of the crazy merry-go-round, was Gideon Teazel, a rock-like man, son, he said, of a lord and a woman of the Rosamescros or Hearnes. He stood six foot eight in his boots and could carry a heifer across his shoulders. His wife Aurora, a pure-bred gipsy, told fortunes, and was mixed up in more activities than would appear from her sleepy manner or her invariable position, pipe in mouth, on the steps of her husband's caravan. Gideon loved to display his devotion for her by grotesque endearments and elephantine caresses--due no doubt to the gaujo strain in him, for the true gipsies always treated their women in public as chattels or beasts of burden, though privately they were entirely under their thumbs. Reuben brought Naomi and Harry into the middle of the Fair. Many people stared at them. It was Harry's first public appearance since his illness, and one or two comments louder than the general hum came to Naomi's ears and made them pink. Harry was soon established on the upturned cask beside the fighting booth which had always been the fiddler's place. He began to play at once--"Nice Young Maidens"--to all appearances quite indifferent to the jostle round him. Naomi could not help marvelling at Reuben, too--he was so cool, possessed and assured, so utterly without anything in the way of embarrassment or self-consciousness.