She worked on a while then in her seed beds and with her hoe she cut a little gate in the higher edge of the bed and she dug a small water way to the pond, and then she went to the pond’s edge and with her buckets slung upon the pole she dipped first one and then the other into the water and then emptied them into the ditch she had dug. Over and over she dipped the water and watched the earth grow dark and moist and it seemed to her she fed some thirsting living thing and gave it life. Now while she was at this task she straightened her back once and set her buckets down and went and sat upon the green edge of the pond to rest, and as she sat she looked to the north where the hamlet was and there she saw a man stop and ask the old woman something and then he turned and came toward her where she sat by this pond. She looked as he came and knew him. It was the landlord’s agent, and while he came she remembered she had his trinkets still and she hung her head not knowing how to speak of them without giving them back again, and not daring now to go and find them and give them back to him in this full light of day when any passing soul might see her do it and the old woman wide awake, too, in the sun, and she was quick to see a thing she ought not. So the man came on, and when he was come the mother rose slowly, being lesser in place than he and woman, too, before a man. But he called out freely and he said, “Goodwife, I came but to look and see what the wheat is this year and guess the harvest from the fields!” But while he spoke his eyes ran up and down her body, clad for the heat in but a single coat and trousers of patched blue stuff worn thin and close to her shape and his eyes fixed themselves upon her bare brown feet and in fear of her own heart she muttered rudely, “The fields lie yonder--look then, and see!” So he glanced over them from where he stood and he said in his pleasant, townsman’s way, “Very fair fields, goodwife, and there have been worse harvests than there will be this year.” And he took out a little folded book and wrote something down on it with a sort of stick she had never seen before, seeing he needed not to dip it in ink at all, as the letter writer did, for it came out black itself. She watched him write and half it made her curious and half it touched her and made her proud to think so learned and goodly a man had looked at one like her, even when he should not, and she thought she would not speak of the trinkets this one time. When he had finished his writing he said to her smiling and smoothing his lip, “If you have time, show me that other field of yours that stands in barley, for I ever do forget which is yours and which your cousin’s.” “Mine is there around the hill,” she said half unwillingly, and now her eyes were dropped and she made as if to take the hoe again.