The women joined us on the third day to begin haymaking, and the air was fragrant of tossed and sun-dried grass. One of them walked apart from the rest, without interest or freedom of movement; her face, sealed and impassive, was aged beyond the vigour of her years. I knew the woman by sight, and her history by hearsay. We have a code of morals here—not indeed peculiar to this place or people—that a wedding is ‘respectable’ if it precedes child-birth by a bare month, tolerable, and to be recognised, should it succeed the same by less than a year (provided the pair are not living in the same village); but the child that has never been ‘fathered’ and the wife without a ring are ‘anathema,’ and such in one was Elizabeth Banks. She went away a maid and came back a year ago with a child and without a name. Her mother was dead, her father and the village would have none of her: the homing instinct is very strong, or she would scarcely have returned, knowing the traditions of the place. Old Dodden, seeing her, grumbled to me in the rest-time.—“Can’t think what the farmer wants wi’ Lizzie Banks in ’is field.” “She must live,” I said, “and by all showing her life is a hard one.” “She ’ad the makin’ of ’er bed,” he went on, obstinately. “What for do she bring her disgrace home, wi’ a fatherless brat for all folks to see? We don’t want them sort in our village. The Lord’s hand is heavy, an’ a brat’s a curse that cannot be hid.” When tea-time came I crossed the field to look for a missing hone, and saw Elizabeth Banks far from the other women, busied with a bundle under the hedge. I passed close on my search, and lo! the bundle was a little boy. He lay smiling and stretching, fighting the air with his small pink fists, while the wind played with his curls. “A curse that cannot be hid,” old Dodden had said. The mother knelt a moment, devouring him with her eyes, then snatched him to her with aching greed and covered him with kisses. I saw the poor, plain face illumined, transfigured, alive with a mother’s love, and remembered how the word came once to a Hebrew prophet:— Say unto your brethren Ammi, and to your sisters Ruhamah. The evening sky was clouding fast, the sound of rain was in the air; Farmer Marler shook his head as he looked at the grass lying in ordered rows. I was the last to leave, and as I lingered at the gate drinking in the scent of the field and the cool of the coming rain, the first drops fell on my upturned face and kissed the poor dry swathes at my feet, and I was glad. David, child of the fields and the sheepfolds, his kingship laid aside, sees through the parted curtain of the years the advent of his greater Son, and cries in his psalm of the hilltops, his last prophetic prayer:— He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass.