Nell’s heart constricted with pain. She told herself that she was a fool to be so sensitive, that it was not likely Mr. Poullett-Smith would greet her publicly in the manner of their harvest friendship. But she could get no comfort from her self-rebuke, for deep in herself she knew that she was wise. Doubtless there was no importance to be attached to the coldness of her friend’s greeting. Nevertheless, he had that morning, silently and symbolically, declared the gulf between them. In the cornfield, working as her comrade, he had stood for a short while on her level—for the first time her efforts to attract him had been without handicap. But now the handicap was restored—he was the Priest-in-Charge of Brownbread Street, and she was the daughter of a drunken farmer. If for a few hours she had charmed him out of his eminent sense of fitness, the charm was over now. What had this dignified, cassocked ecclesiastic to do with her, a poor little nobody? His friendliness during their common toil had been a mere passing emotion; probably she had exaggerated it—even the little her memory held must be halved, and that poor remainder cancelled out by the probability that he had forgotten it. As a matter of fact the curate had not forgotten it, but the attraction had not been robust enough to survive the loss of its surroundings. He saw that he had been unwise and rather unkind in yielding so easily to a mere temporary prepossession. His more solid affections had long been engaged elsewhere, and he spent some hours of real self-reproach for having ever so briefly faltered. He might have put ideas into the girl’s head—they had certainly been in his own. However, he reflected, there was not time to have done much harm, and he would set matters straight at once. So for the next month his behaviour to Nell was unflaggingly cold and polite, and at the end of it all the parish was told of his engagement to Marian Lamb. 3 There were days of desolation for Nell Beatup that November. Her disappointment gripped her as a black frost grips the fields; she felt powerless, bound, and sterile. Even the last month, when bit by bit her happy memories were destroyed, when she learned that all her hopes were built on an exaggeration, a mistake, even that month of slow disillusion had been better than this black month of despair. In October a few crumpled leaves had reddened the trees, a few pale draggled flowers had sweetened the garden, a bird had sometimes perched on the gable end and sung before he flew away. But now the fields were black and the woods were dun, the lanes were a poach of mud, and the smell of mud hung above field-gates and barns—a clammy mist rose from the ponds, making the air substantial with the taste of water ... tears ... they seemed to hang in the rainy clouds, to dribble from the trodden earth, and, mixed with the dead summer’s dust, they made a grey slimy mud that sobbed and sucked under her feet on her daily trudge to school.