Then, with a sudden fervour unknown in more temperate climes, spring came. The sloes were sprayed with light; the hue of hawthorn twigs paled; in the space of a single week the whole earth broke in a green flame. Nor was it only green things that were born. White lambs appeared as by magic in the fields, seeming as little dependent on the agency of men as the white daisies. At evening, when Abner came home from work, they leapt into the air and twisted their heads sideways in the leap. The valley was full of tender bleatings. He laughed at them, striding homewards. His mates laughed and whistled at their work. Even the sad, disfigured face of Munn grew blandly, childishly happy. Gladys and Morgan knew that spring had come—indeed they had known of its coming long before Abner suspected it. They made great plans to go out into the fields with Spider and see the lambs at play; they cried when bedtime came, for very excess of life. ‘But it ban’t dark, mam,’ they said, coaxing Mary to let them play a little longer. She could not refuse them, for she herself loved to sit sewing in the doorway, hearing their voices echoed from the warming walls of the house while the swallows darted to and fro under the eaves above her. She would sit there talking lazily to old Drew, who now began to be busy with his garden. When she inquired how his rheumatism was, he would straighten his back with a smile, and tell her that he felt like a man of thirty. When rain came he would stand on his step gazing at the garden fondly, as though he expected to see his seeds pushing above the finely-tilled soil. During all these days they heard nothing of George. The three months of silence that the law imposes on a prisoner in jail were now over. Mick Connor, that specialist in all the details of a criminal’s life, informed Abner that when this time was over, the convict was usually allowed the privilege of writing one letter a month, and, if his conduct were good enough, he might even receive one visitor of his choice. But no letter came to Wolfpits. One day at his work Abner overheard a conversation between two of his mates from which he gathered that Mrs Malpas had made a journey to Shrewsbury and seen her son. ‘He’s looking up fine, by all accounts,’ said one of them, ‘and the old woman’s pleased as anything he hasn’t sent for his missus.’ Abner experienced a sudden feeling of anger for Mary’s sake. He felt the slight almost as much as if it had been pointed against himself; but on the way home he decided that it would be better not to tell her. Probably she imagined that a prisoner was shut off from all communication with the outer world for the term of his sentence; and, if this were so, it was better that she should remain in ignorance. Who would be George’s next visitor? The woman from Lesswardine?