Then she became for the next half-hour an entirely delightful companion, talking gaily in her pretty cadenced voice, flitting here and there like some white bird about the big fragrant cowshed, eager with the impulsive eagerness of a child to show that she too knew how to milk. Dick had taught her. She spoke of him frequently and without self-consciousness. She told Ruth many things that interested her to know. And gradually the curious shell of hardness, that apparent want of sympathy with all the beautiful teeming life of the farm disappeared. She milked, to Ruth’s astonishment, well and deftly. She understood much about chicken and pigs. She held the down-soft yellow ducklings in her shapely hands, and broke into open enthusiasm over the little white kid who ran with the herd. “I wonder,” she said, when the milking was over and Ruth suggested tea, “I wonder if by any chance our ‘house on the wall’ is still there?” “You mean where the kitchen garden wall is built out to meet the beech-tree, and the branches are like three seats, the highest one in the middle, and there are some shelves?” “Yes—yes! and you can see all round and no one can see you. Dick built it for us when we were children—Fred, and I, and the Condor boys. We were always here. We played at keeping house up there, and Dick used to tell us stories about all the animals—there was one about a mouse family too—and about the Elementals. The Water Elementals, who took care of the river, and who brought the rain, and the dew in the early summer mornings; they were all like silver gossamer and white foam. And the Earth Elementals, who looked after the flowers’ food; and the Elementals of Fire.” She stopped suddenly and shivered. They were crossing a corner of the orchard on their way to the kitchen garden, and, to Ruth’s astonishment, she looked round her with something like fear in her eyes. “Did you feel it get colder, quite cold,” she said, “as we crossed the footpath just there?” “I believe it did, now you say so,” said Ruth. “You get those funny bands of colder air sometimes. The ground dips too, under those apple-trees.” Violet shivered again. She looked at the apple trees and the odd look of fear in her eyes deepened. “Has anyone ever spoken to you of a man called von Schäde, a German, who used to stay here?” she asked. “No,” said Ruth, and wondered.