So she talked of the price of herrings and the price of onions, and of trade, and of the difficulty of finding customers who had at once appreciation and a free hand. When he drew up in some lean grey village, or at the repellent gates of some isolated slate-roofed house, he gave her the reins to hold, while he, with his samples of fruit and fish laid out on basket lids, wooed custom at the doors. She experienced a strangely crescent interest in his sales. Between the sales they talked. She found it quite easy, having swept back and penned in the major part of her knowledges and interests, to leave a residuum that was quite enough to meet his needs. As the chill dusk fell in cloudy folds over the giant hill shoulders and the cart turned towards home, she shivered. "Are you cold?" he asked solicitously. "The wind strikes keen down between these beastly hills." "Beastly?" she repeated. "Don't you think they're beautiful?" "Yes," he said, "of course I see they're beautiful--for other folks, but not for me. What I like is lanes an' elm trees and farm buildings with red tiles and red walls round fruit gardens--and cherry orchards and thorough good rich medders up for hay, and lilac bushes and bits o' flowers in the gardens, same what I was used to at home." She thrilled to the homely picture. "Why, that's what I like too!" she said. "These great hills--I don't see how they can feel like home to anyone. There's a bit of an orchard--one end of it is just a red barn wall--and there are hedges round, and it's all soft warm green lights and shadows--and thrushes sing like mad. That's home!" He looked at her. "Yes," he said slowly, "that's home." "And then," she went on, "the lanes with the high green hedges, dog-roses and brambles and may bushes and traveller's joy--and the grey wooden hurdles, and the gates with yellow lichen on them, and the white roads and the light in the farm windows as you come home from work--and the fire--and the smell of apples from the loft." "Yes," he said, "that's it--I'm a Kentish man myself. You've got a lot o' words to talk with." When he put her down at the edge of the town she went to rejoin her nurse feeling that to one human being, at least, she had that day been the voice of the home-ideal, and of all things sweet and fair. And, of course, this pleased her very much. Next morning she woke with the vague but sure sense of something pleasant to come. She remembered almost instantly. She had met a man on whom it was pleasant to smile, and whom her smiles and her talk pleased. And she thought,--quite honestly,--that she was being very philanthropic and lightening a dull life. She wrote a long loving letter to John, did a little shopping, and walked out along a road. It was the road by which he had told her that he would go the next day. He overtook her and pulled up with a glad face, that showed her the worth of her smiles and almost repaid it.