As the year climbed up again into spring, a tender pity for Bessie mingled with Robert's love. It was not the pity which begets love, but the sweeter kind which is begotten of it. Robert forgot all about his own hard life, the monotonous ruthless grind of work, the absence of all softness, homeliness, or sympathy, the denial of all gaiety and sport. He thought only of Bessie's troubles, and would have given the world to lighten them. He longed to give her some little treat, or a present. But he had no money. For the first time he inwardly rebelled against the system which kept him penniless. None of the boys had any money, except Pete on Fair days--not even Albert, for the _Rye Advertiser_ did not pay its poets. For the first time Robert saw this as unjust. March blew some warm twilights to Peasmarsh, and the choristers began their summer lingering. Bessie and Robert often took the longer way home by Ellenwhorne--he would not leave her now till they were at her cottage door, and often he would run home hare-footed from Eggs Hole, afraid that he might be shut out of Odiam, and perhaps his precious comradeship discovered and put under the tyrant's ban. Then came an evening in April, when the air smelled of primroses and young leaves. The choir practice was early, and rifts of sunshine sloped up the clerk's kitchen, linking in one golden slant Robert's dark healthy face just under the ceiling, Bessie's shoulders pressed against his arm, the frail old hands of Joe Hearsfield on his flute, and the warm plum-brown of the bass viol close to the floor. To Robert it was all a dream of holiness and harmony. Old Spodgram confined himself almost entirely to two notes, Miss Hubble insisted on her four bars of arrears, young Ditch extemporised an alto of surprising reediness, and Robert bellowed the last lines of the last verse just as the other choristers were loudly taking in breath preparatory to line three--but the whole thing was to him a foretaste of Paradise and the angels singing ever world without end. When the practice was over it was still light, and Robert and Bessie turned inevitably along the little bostal that trickles through the fields towards Ramstile. As usual they did not speak, but in each glowed the thought that they had a full two hours to live through together in the mystery of these sorrowless fields. The sun set as they came to Ellenwhorne. They stood and watched it dip behind the little cluster of roofs and oast-houses in the west. The turrets of the oasts stood out black against the crimson, then suddenly they purpled, faded into their background of night-washed cloud. The fields were very dark in their low corners, only their high sweeps shimmered in the ghostly lemon glow. Out of the rabbit-warrens along the hedges, from the rims of the woods, ran the rabbits to scuttle and play. Bessie and Robert saw the bob of their white tails through the dusk, and now and then a little long-eared shape.