From where she sat Ruth could see the rose-red roofs of Thorpe with the white pigeons drowsing in the heat. Her cottages were to be equally beautiful on a smaller scale. She dreamt, as she sat in the warmth and the sweetness, with Bertram Aurelius cooing softly in her lap, visualizing pictures such as were growing in the minds of many in the great year of Peace, seeing beautiful homes where the strong man and the mother, with sturdy round-limbed children, should live, where the big sons and comely daughters should come in and out, in the peace of plenty and to the sound of laughter. It might all be so wonderful, for the wherewithal is ours, is here with us. The good brown earth, the sun and the rain, fire and water, all the teeming life of nature, all ours to mould into a life of beauty for ourselves and our children. Dreams? Yes. But such dreams are the seeds of the beautiful, which shall, if they find soil, blossom into beauty in the time to come, for the little children lying on our knees, clutching at our hearts. Presently there intruded into Ruth’s dreams the large presence of Mr. Pithey, and she discovered him standing in the white dust of the road in front of her. Disapproval and curiosity both appeared together in his little sharp eyes. According to Mr. Pithey’s ideas it was distinctly unseemly for a person in Ruth’s position to sit by the roadside “like a common tramp,” as he expressed it to Mrs. Pithey later on. To his mind, somehow, the baby in her lap accentuated the unseemliness, and it made the thing worse that she was both hatless and gloveless. Had she been properly dressed for the roads, the rest might have been an accident. “I should think you’d get a sunstroke, sitting by the road like that without your hat,” he said. Mr. Pithey himself was expensively dressed in pale grey with a white waistcoat and spats. On his head he wore a five-guinea panama, and his general appearance forcibly reminded Ruth of an immaculately groomed large, pale yellow pig. Her grey eyes smiled at him out of her sun-browned face. She had a disarming smile. “I believe I was nearly asleep,” she said, and dug her knuckles into her eyes much as a child does. Mr. Pithey softened. “What on earth are you sitting there for?” he asked. “Just dreaming. But you mustn’t think I’m an idler, Mr. Pithey. Even Pan sleeps at this hour.” Her smile deepened, and Mr. Pithey softened still more. He stepped out of the dust into the grass, passing as he did so into a more friendly attitude. “Pan?—that’s a queer name for a baby!” he said. The smile became just the softest thing in laughs. “Well, his proper name is Bertram Aurelius. But Pan——” She held Bertram Aurelius up the while he chuckled at her, striving to fit his hand into his mouth. “Look at his blue eyes, and his little pointed ears, and his head of red down. Really Pan suits him much better.”