How dreadful! Already she saw an insect crawling over the bed--probably there were lots of others about the room; and these flowers, all parched, dead, and evil-smelling, gave a sinister touch to her wedding day. A lump rose in her throat, the back of her eyes was seared by something hot and sudden.... Oh, Harry ... Harry.... Then misery turned to rage. It was Reuben who had brought her to this, who had stolen her from Harry, forced her into marrying him, and exposed her to this anguish. She hated Reuben. She hated him. With all the fierceness of her conquered soul and yielded body she hated him. She would have nothing more to do with him, she would be revenged on him, punish him ... a little hoarse scream of rage burst from her lips, and she turned suddenly and ran out of that dreadful room. She ran down the passage, panting and sobbing with rage. Then at the stair head something even blacker than the darkness met her. It seized her, it swung her up, she was powerless as a little bird in its grasp. Her struggles were crushed in the kind strong arms that held her, and rage was stifled from her lips with kisses. BOOK II THE WOMAN'S PART § 1. An elegy of oats. Reuben's oats were a dismal failure. All the warm thrilling hopes which he had put into the ground with the seed and the rape cake, all the watching and expectation which had imparted as many delights as Naomi to the first weeks of his married life--all had ended in a few rows of scraggy, scabrous murrainous little shoots, most of which wilted as if with shame directly they appeared above the ground, while the others, after showing him and a derisive neighbourhood all that oats could do in the way of tulip-roots, sedge-leaves, and dropsical husk, shed their seeds in the first summer gale, and started July as stubble. There was no denying it. Boarzell had beaten Reuben in this their first battle. That coarse, shaggy, unfruitful land had refused to submit to husbandry. Backfield had not yet taken Leviathan as his servant. His defeat stimulated local wit. "How's the peas gitting on, Mäaster?" Ditch of Totease would facetiously enquire. "I rode by that new land of yours yesterday, and, says I, there's as fine a crop of creeping plants as ever I did see." "'Täun't peas, thick 'un," Vennal would break in uproariously, "it's turnips--each of 'em got a root like my fist." "And here wur I all this time guessing as it wur cabbages acause of the leaves," old Ginner would finish, not to be outdone in badinage. Reuben always accepted such chaff good-humouredly, for he knew it was prompted by envy, and he would have scorned to let these men know how much he had been hurt. Also, though defeated, he was quite undaunted. He was not going to be beaten. That untractable slope of marl should be sown as permanent pasture in the spring, and he would grow oats on the new piece he would buy at the end of the year with his wife's fortune.