“You asked me to tell you something of my friend, Dick Carey,” he said as he sat down. “And at any rate what you have told me gives you, I feel, the right to ask. There isn’t much to tell. We were at school and college together. Charterhouse and Trinity. And we knocked about the world a good bit together till I married. Then he took Thorpe and settled down to farming. He loved the place, as you have discovered. And he loved all beasts and birds. A wonderful chap with horses, clever too on other lines, which isn’t always the case. A great reader and a bit of a musician. He went to France with Kitchener’s first hundred thousand, and he lived through two years of that hell. He wasn’t decorated, or mentioned in dispatches, but I saw the men he commanded, and cared for, and fought with. They knew. They knew what one of them called ‘the splendid best’ of him. Oh well! I suppose he was like many another we lost out there, but for me, when he died, it was as if a light had gone out and all the world was a darker place.” “Thank you,” said Ruth quite simply, yet the words said much. There was a little pause, then he added: “He became engaged to my daughter just before he was killed.” “Ah!” The little exclamation held a world of pain and pity. He felt glad she did not add the usual “poor thing,” and possibly that was why he volunteered further. “She has married since, but I doubt if she has got over it.” It was some time before either spoke again. Then Ruth said, almost shyly, “There is just one thing more. The buttercup field? I can’t quite understand it. It is bad farming, that field. The only bit of bad farming on the place.” “You did not guess?” “No.” Ruth looked at him, her head a little on one side, her brow drawn, puzzled. “He kept it for its beauty,” said North. “It is a wonderful bit of colour you know, that sheeted gold,” he added almost apologetically, when for a moment Ruth did not answer. But she was mentally kicking herself. “Of course!” she exclaimed. “How utterly stupid of me. I ought to have understood. How utterly and completely stupid of me. I have never thought of what he would wish from that point of view. I have been simply trying to farm well. And I love that field for its beauty too. Look at it in the western sunlight against the may hedge.” “It was the same with the may hedges,” said North. “A fellow who came here to buy pigs said they ought to be grubbed up, they were waste of land. He wanted railings. He thought old Dick mad when he said he got his value out of them to look at, and good value too.” “I didn’t know about the hedges wasting land,” said Ruth. “But I might have grubbed up the buttercups.” She looked so genuinely distressed that North laughed.