“I like to watch the windows open their eyes,” Lancaster said. “They’re so quiet, and yet there’s all life behind them. Tragedy, often. At Oxenfoot the old man’s dying by half-inches. Up at Topthorns they’re slipping slowly down the fell into the workhouse. It’s nobody’s fault, and nobody can help. The young folk at Cowgill--bad hats, every one of them!--make the place a hell among them, with the hate and the quarrelling and the mean striving to best the rest. Better things, too--men and women sticking to in the teeth of bad luck and bad health, paying their rent somehow, and keeping a stiff neck whatever comes along. All life--and yet the lights so quiet and steady, just as if peace were the real thing and the trouble behind only an ugly shadow. You don’t remember it, outside. You think of folk sitting happy round a fire or at their evening meal, or slipping away quietly to sleep. You think of home.” Over Dandy, listening, came a sudden longing for Halsted, cheerful, rampant, unmagicked, clean away from this mist-wrapped lane and the man who made the underneath things seem so real. They were not hers and therefore she feared them, and though they were not even looking at her, cared nothing for her existence, she ran away from them in spirit as fast as she could scamper. “It doesn’t mean home to _me_!” she broke out with reckless hurry. “At _my_ home there’s a blaze from hundreds of tantalums, and there are motor-horns tooting on the drive and crowds of people coming up the steps, laughing and talking. There’s dancing in the drawing-room, and snooker in the billiard-room and rinking in the hall. In _your_ house there’s a bowl of milk and a candle and a smoky chimney and a hard bed”--she was half-hysterical, by now--“but in mine there are spring-mattresses and gramophones and Thermos flasks and electric hair-curlers----” She stopped, laughing unsteadily. “You’ve made me really home-sick for the first time since I came to Watters!” He turned from the gap, rebuffed and ashamed. “Afraid I’ve bored you!” he apologised bluntly. “Why didn’t you stop me yarning? Harriet said I’d get mooning about turnips, you know. I’ve only one subject. You’ll soon learn to steer clear of it! That’s Wigmore behind us, I should say.” Wiggie joined them, trying very hard to put a morning freshness into his dragging step, and because Dandy had fallen silent, exerted himself to bridge the gulf. He was quite willing to make an ass of himself over the rotation of crops, if it saved her the burden of conversation.