She shrank back as if hurt. “No, oh no! It is not me. It is something altogether beyond me. Oh, do listen. They were always slipping in, or standing by the gate with their little faces peeping between the bars. Quite tinies some of them, and I took them back to their homes at first. I thought their mothers would be anxious. And then—then I began to guess. So now I have given them the field beyond the stream and they come out of school hours.” “The lower field!” exclaimed North. “No wonder you have taken Fothersley’s breath away.” “Oh, he does not know of that. Fortunately he was here in the morning during school hours, so he only saw the Blackwall children. You see,” she added apologetically, “it is _such_ a child’s field, with the stream and the little wood with blue-bells, and there are cowslips in the spring and nuts in the autumn, and I shall make hay as usual, of course. We cut on Tuesday.” “Don’t you find them very destructive?” “They haven’t trampled down a yard of grass,” said Ruth triumphantly. “I gave them a strip by the stream under the silver birches. The primrose bit, you know, and the wood. And the hay is in a way their property. You go and try to walk across it! You’ll have a nest full of jackdaws at you!” “But the trees and flowers!” “That is just another thing,” she smiled at him. “Oh, why won’t you believe? I have had to teach them hardly anything. They know. No branch is ever torn down. Never will you find those pathetic little bunches of picked and thrown-away flowers here. The birds are just as tame. I teach them very little. I’m afraid of spoiling my clumsy help. It is so wonderful. They bring crumbs of any special bit of cake they get, for the birds, and plant funny little bits of roots and sow seeds. Come down and see them with me. I don’t take, or tell, other people. I am so afraid of it getting spoilt.” North extracted his long frame from his chair. “All right,” he said, with that odd smile of his as of one humouring a child. “But you are mad, you know, quite mad.” “You said that to me before.” And then North remembered suddenly that he had often said it to Dick Carey. Their way led across the flower garden, and under the cherry-orchard trees where the daisies shone like snow on the green of the close-cut grass. Here they found Bertram Aurelius lying on his back talking in strange language to the whispering leaves above him, and curling and uncurling his bare pink toes in the dappled sunlight. His mother sat beside him, her back against a tree trunk, mending the household linen when she could keep her eyes off him for more than a minute. The dogs fell upon Bertram Aurelius, who took them literally to his bosom, fighting them just as a little puppy fights, and his mother smiled up at them with her big blue eyes and foolish loose-lipped red mouth. “Have you ever heard anything of the father?” said North, when they were out of earshot.