Though they were technically a Couple, they never spoke of love. They never even kissed or held each other's hands, however tenderly the velvet darkness called. He told her about his work at Odiam--about the little calf that was born that day, or the trouble he had had, patching the rent in the pigsty, or how the poultry had not taken well to their new food, but preferred something with more sharps in it. She in her turn would tell him how she had washed little Georgie's shirt--taking advantage of a warm day when he could run about naked--how her mother had lamentable hard pains all down her back, how her father had got drunk at the harvest supper and tried to beat her. Sometimes they looked in the hedges for birds' nests, or watched the rabbits skipping in the dusk. They would gape up at the stars together and call the constellations by names of their own--Orion was "the gurt tree," and Cassiopeia was "the sheep trough," and Pegasus was "the square meadow." It was all very wonderful and sweet to Robert, and when at last he crept under the sheets in the apple-smelling garret he would dream of him and Bessie wandering in the Peasmarsh fields--or sometimes in those starry meadows where the hedges shone and twinkled with the fruit of constellations, and Charles drove his waggon along a golden road, and sheep ate from a flickering trough under a great tree of lamps. § 9. Bessie tinted the world for Robert like a sunrise. All through the day he carried memories of lightless woods, of fields hushed in the swale, of the smudge of her old purple cotton beside him--of, perhaps, some dim divine moment when his hand had touched hers hanging at her side. Then winter came, with carol-singing, and the choristers tramped round, lantern-led, from farm to farm. There in the fluttering light outside Kitchenhour, Old Turk, Ellenwhorne, or Edzell, Robert would watch Bessie's chicory-flower eyes under her hood, while the steam of their breath mingled in the frosty air, and they drooped their heads together, singing to each other, only to each other, "Good King Wenceslas," "As Joseph was a-walking," or "In the Fields with their Flocks." As they were both simple souls, their love only made the words more real. Sometimes it seemed almost as if they could see up in the white glistering field behind the barn, the manger with the baby in it, the mother watching near, and the ox and the ass standing meekly beside them in the straw. Bessie said she felt sure that the shepherds watched their flocks by night in the little old meadow at the corner of Totease ... she once thought she had heard them singing. But she would not go and look.