He drank his tea and fed the dogs shamelessly, for the most part in silence, and Ruth watched him in the comfortable certainty that he was quite oblivious of her scrutiny. He interested her, this man of a world-wide fame, not because of that fame, but because her instinct told her that between him and the late owner of Thorpe there had been a great love. When she no longer met the glance of the humorous, tired eyes, and the pleasant voice, talking lightly, was silent, she could see the weary soul of the man in his face. A tragic face, tragic because it was both powerful and hopeless. He turned to her presently and asked, “May I light a pipe, and have a mouch round?” Ruth nodded. She felt a sense of comradeship already between them. “You will find me here when you come back,” she said. “This is my hour for the newspaper.” But though she unfolded it and spread it out, crumpling its pages in the effort, after the fashion of women, she was not reading of “The Railway Deadlock,” of “The Victory March of the Guards,” or of “The 1,000–Mile Flight by British Airship,” all spread temptingly before her; she was thinking of the man who had owned Thorpe Farm, the man whom Larry and Roger North had loved, the man who lived for her, who had never known him, in the woods and fields that had been his. The first evening shadows began to fall softly; a flight of rooks cawed home across the sky. The sounds of waking life about the farm died out one by one. Presently Roger North came back and sat down again, pulling hard at his pipe. His strong dark face was full of shadows too. “I am glad you have this place,” he said abruptly. “He would have been glad too.” And suddenly emboldened, Ruth asked the question that had been trembling on her lips ever since he had come. “Will you tell me something about him?” she said. “Lately I have so wanted to know. It isn’t idle curiosity. I would not dare to ask you if it were. And it would be only some one who cared that can tell me what I want to know. Because—I don’t quite know how to explain—but I seem to have got into touch, as it were, with the mind of the man who made and loved this place. At first it was only that I kept wondering why he had done this or that, if he would approve of what I was doing. But lately I have—oh, how can I explain it?—I have a sense of awareness of him. I _know_ in some sort of odd way, what he would do if he were still here. And when I have carried a thing out, made some change or improvement, I know if he is pleased. Of course I expect it sounds quite mad to you. It isn’t even as if I had known him——” She looked at North apologetically.