They met most evenings, he walking eastward, she westward, to Four Wents; there, where the tall stile stands between two shocks of fennel, they would lean together in the first charm of tryst, the dusk thickening round them, hazing road and fields and barns and bushes, their own faces swimming up out of it to each other’s eyes, like reflections in a pond—hers round and flushed under her tousled hair, like a poppy in a barley-field, his brown and predatory with its hawk-like nose and piercing eye under the grizzled curls. Then the dusk would smudge them into each other and they would become one in the swale.... He led her up and down the little rutted lanes, under a violet sky where the stars were red and the moon was a golden horn. The thick fanning of the July air brought scents of hayseed and flowering bean, the miasmic perfume of meadowsweet, the nutty smell of ripening corn, and the drugged sweetness of hopfields. All round them would hang the great tender silence of night, the passionate stillness of the earth under the moon, and their poor broken words only seemed a part of that silence.... “My loove, my li’l lass.” ... “I love you unaccountable, Willie.” ... “Coom closer, my dear.” ... The wind rustled over the orchards of Soul Street, and the horns of the moon were red, and the sky thick and dark as a grape, when they came back to the tall stile at the throws, and parted there with caresses which love made groping and vows which love choked to whispers. On Sundays they met more ceremonially, pacing up and down the road at Sunday Street, from the shop to the Rifle Volunteer—which was the parade-ground of those girls of the parish who had sweethearts. Here Jen Hollowbone showed her Ted and Polly Sinden her Bill, and Ivy Beatup showed her Willie, walking proudly on his arm, smiling with all her teeth at the girls whose sweethearts were away and at the girls who had no sweethearts at all.