It was a busy year for me at Furzy Nook; for as Farmer Foster grew older I had of course more and more on my hands. Time passed wonderfully quick--Sunday after Sunday marking off a week that ended before I had thought of it as much more than begun. We could let the weeks go as they would now, without counting every one as a fresh link in a chain of waiting. There was nothing to wait for, or to hope for any longer. So they all said. It was better for Hildred that it should be so. After that dark winter was past, she began to brighten with the spring. She was no longer the merry careless child she used to be. All that was over. But the flower that the rain had beaten down, lifted its head again slowly. It was not that she had any thought of seeing Cuthbert again. Her last hope died on that Sunday after Christmas Day. No one was of the same mind as I was. Everybody called him 'poor Cuthbert,' and spoke of him as dead--everybody, odd to say, excepting good old Farmer Foster. Directly he heard my doubts he went far beyond me, into a perfect certainty of hopefulness. 'We shall have him home upon us, never fear, before we know where we are,' he used to say; and as I walked beside his pony over the Furzy Nook fields, he told me again and again the same half-forgotten story, the end of which he never could remember, about some prisoners who escaped out of a French prison when he was a lad. I repeated the story, such as it was, to Hildred, but it did not cheer her. I thought she looked rather more grave than usual afterwards. 'Catching at straws still, Willie,' she said, shaking her head. I suppose it was another straw I caught at later in the summer. One market-day at Morechester, as I stood near the Cross, I heard the ill-omened sounds of fifes and drums, and presently a recruiting party marched down on us from the High Street. It carried me back in a moment to that evening three years ago. I almost seemed to see the purple sky above the village street, and the lights shining through the inn-windows, and then the ribands in Cuthbert's hat, as the loud voice of the recruiting sergeant sounded in my ears. No wonder that I recalled it so vividly, for as they drew near, I saw that this was the same man who had enlisted Cuthbert. I knew his upright figure and broad good-humoured face directly. The people round were laughing at the very same jokes that I remembered hearing in the street of Wyncliffe. I made my way up to him in the crowd. He had seen Cuthbert after we had, and might somehow know what had become of him. There were two lads near him staring up in open-mouthed admiration of his scarlet coat and soldierly stride. He turned away from them to me. 'No, I don't want to enlist,' I said, in answer to the accustomed speech. 'I am come to ask you a question. Do you mind one Cuthbert Franklyn, that you enlisted here three years ago?'