A pale cowslip light was in the sky, creeping over the fields, putting yellower tints into Thyrza’s butter skin and a web of gold over her ashen hair. Gradually it seemed to flower in the dusk till all the field was lit up ... the mounds and molehills with hollows scooped darkly against the light, the pond like thick yellow glass, the willows like drooping flame. The picture became graven on Tom’s heart—the grey sky blooming with light and shedding it down on the field of the mounds and molehills, the pond, the willows, and the woman drowsing in his arms—so that when later in France he thought of England, he thought of it only as that willow-pond at the opening of Sunday Street, and Thyrza Honey lying heavy and warm and sweet against his breast. “Hold me close, Tom, dearie—hold me close, so’s I doan’t hear the war. Aun’t it queer how our hearts beat louder than the guns!...” PART III: THYRZA 1 That autumn and winter there was a lot of talk in the papers about food. Wedged into news of the Ancre and Beaumont Hamel, the crumpling-up of Roumania under von Mackensen, and President Wilson’s Peace Note, came paragraphs and letters and articles on food and the ways of economising and producing it. The latter most troubled Harry, as he thought of the modest spring-sowings of Worge. If it was indeed true that the German U-boats were threatening the country’s wheat supply, might it not be as well to reclaim the old tillage of the Sunk Field or even break up grass-land in the high meadows by Bucksteep? Harry did not often read the papers, getting all his news from the _Daily Express_ poster which Mrs. Honey displayed outside the shop when the papers arrived at noon; but when paper-restrictions brought posters to an end, he went skimming through Mus’ Beatup’s _Sussex News_, and one day skimming was changed to plodding by a very solid article on wheat-production and the present needs. In many ways it was a revelation to Harry. Though he had been a farm-boy all his life it had never struck him till then that grain-growing was of any importance to the nation, or imagined that the Worge harvests mattered outside Worge. The fields, the stock had been to him all so many means of livelihood, and the only motive of himself and his fellow-workers the negative one of keeping Worge from the auctioneer’s. If he ever realised his part in the great adventure, it was only when he saw his duty to keep the place together for Tom to fight for. This was his newest and highest motive, and when he refused the call of distant woods, broke with the Brownbread rat-and-sparrow club, and paid no more than a business visit to Senlac Fair, it was so that Tom’s sacrifice should not be in vain. But here was a chap making out that a farmer was very nearly as important as a soldier, and that it was on the wheat-fields of England as well as on the battlefields of France that the war would be won....