The silvery-yellow hair toning into the pale brown skin. The powerful sweep of the brows over eyes set flush with their large orbits, prominent, brilliant, mobile as the eyes of a bird of flight. The nose, arched and jutting like a kite’s beak, with large sensitive nostrils, the somewhat sunken cheek and the sharply-angled jaw, the little ear and the rounded skull superbly set upon the full muscular neck rising out of the collar of the gabardine, made up a portrait upon which some happy woman might well dote and dream. It was five o’clock and the breeze that smelt of heather and clover-hay and strawberries blew more strongly, straight from under the westering sun. Patrine drank in deep draughts of the buoyant sweetness. The leaden gyves had fallen from her limbs, the leaden weight had lifted from her bosom. She had recovered something of her old, elastic grace of movement, that even the sheath-skirt could not spoil. Looking at her, Sherbrand said to himself: "She walks like a Highland hill-woman or a native girl of the Philippines. And—did Heaven or a Bond Street specialist give her that extraordinary hair? I rather hate it, and yet I have to go on looking at it. Does she know? I wonder if she knows?" She felt his eyes on her. And the buoyant sense of well-being that his presence brought to her was mingled with an agony of apprehension. Her heart clamoured, like a brooding thrush attacked by the owl, that Bawne should not be permitted to risk himself with von Herrnung. "_Does any other living being know him as I know him?_" she asked herself. "_If by some misadventure it came to a question of one life or the other, would he scruple—no! he would not scruple for an instant to sacrifice the child?_" Three words to Uncle Owen—if one only dared to speak them—would have put the thing out of the question. But at the thought of the dreadful avowal to which such an utterance might lead, Patrine was stricken dumb. She could not face the music. This was one little ear of wild oats out of the full field that waited for her reaping, sown in the hours that lie between the midnight of pleasure and the dawn of the Day of Remorse. Perhaps she and Sherbrand had walked more slowly than it had seemed to her. She saw Saxham and his son meet, heard, indistinctly the exchange of a few brief sentences, and then the boy, with a jump to hug his father round the neck, ran to her as she came up. "Cousin Pat, I’m going to get into my flying-kit in a minute." His heart was thumping so that it shook him, and the short upper lip with the gold-brown dust of freckles on it quivered, hard as he tried to keep it stiff: "One doesn’t do it before people generally—but I’d rather like you to kiss me now!" "My precious, a dozen times!"