Ruth felt a sudden tightening of the strings about her heart, and when Ralph had disappeared she sat down by the window and looked with unseeing eyes out across the garden. She was back again in the old home, the home in which she had spent so many happy and peaceful years, and from which she had been exiled so long. She was very happy, on the whole, and yet she realised in a very poignant sense that Hillside could never be again what it had been. It was bound to be something more or something less. Nothing could restore the past, nothing could give back what had been taken away. The twilight was deepening rapidly across the landscape, the tender green of spring was vanishing into a sombre black. From over the low hill came fitfully the rattle of stamps which had been erected in Dingley Bottom, and occasionally the creak of winding gear could be faintly heard. From the front windows of the house there was no change in the landscape, but from the kitchen and dairy windows the engine-house, with its tall, clumsy stack, loomed painfully near. Ralph had planted a double line of young trees along the ridge, which in time would shut off that part of the farm given over to mining operations, but at present they were only just breaking into leaf. It was at first a very real grief to Ruth that the mine so disfigured the farm. She recalled the years of ungrudging toil given by her father to bring the waste land under cultivation, and now the fields were being turned into a desert once more. She soon, however, got reconciled to the change. The best of the fields remained unharmed, and the man and boy who looked after the farm had quite as much as they could attend to. Ralph did not mind so long as there was a bowl of clotted cream on the table at every meal. Beyond that his interest in the farm ceased. But the mine was a never-failing source of pleasure to him. Tin was not the only product of those mysterious veins that threaded their way through the solid earth. There were nameless ores that hitherto had been treated as of no account because no use had been found for them. Ralph began making experiments at once. His laboratory grew more rapidly than any other department. His early passion for chemistry received fresh stimulus, and had room for full play, with the result that he made his salary twice over by what he saved out of the waste.