"This is your tram, ma," he said, and helped her in. A fortnight later the same car stood at the same door, when Ruth emerged, her baby in her arms. It was dusk, and she did not see the chauffeur, who leaned out towards her. "Would you come up in front alongside me?" he said. "I put your box inside." Ruth obeyed. They drove through the gathering shadows in the sweet-scented June evening, past Ratton and Polefax, all along the foot of the Downs, the Wilmington Giant with his great staff gleaming wan and ogre-like on the hillside, and at the Turn-pike, just where the spire of B'rick church is seen pricking out of trees, turned for the gap and ran down the valley towards the Haven. A sea-wind with a sparkle in it blowing up the Brooks seemed to meet the softer breezes of the Weald and penetrate them. A young moon hung over the sharp crest of Wind-hover. Ruth, her baby in her arms, picked up familiar objects as they swung by: the long-backed barn on the left, the little red pillar-box on the wall, and occasionally the glimmer of a light in one of the homesteads among trees across the stream. On her right, unhedged cornlands swept away in a rustling sea towards the foot of the Downs which made a bulwark of darkness against the firmament; while on the near rise a row of stacks, like immense bee-hives, stood sentinel under the stars. The car slid down a hill and up again. The valley lay naked alongside them now, cattle moving darkly in the moonlight and the tower of the church upon the hill black against the night in front. The chauffeur took out his clutch. The car was running so noiselessly that Ruth could hear the ghostly stir and murmur of the willows that line the river-bank and cover the feet of the village with a green girdle. "You don't remember me then?" said the man beside her. They were the first words he had spoken. Ruth glanced at the face beside her own, smooth and smiling in the moon, and clutched her baby to her so fiercely that it gave a little cry. "Ah," said Alf, "I thought you would then." The impression he had made seemed to please and satisfy him. He put his engine into gear, and was soon running through the village-street. At the foot of the hill, where a group of mighty elms on a high bank guard the seaward entrance to the village, he turned sharply to the left under a row of pollarded poplars, and bumped over Parson's Tye quiet in the moonlight, the church four-square among its trees upon the mound on the right. Then he drew up by the stile leading into the Brooks. Ruth descended swiftly, and her babe lying like a snowdrift in her arms, disappeared in the darkness through the stile. Alf waited beside his car, watching the river like a snake crawling and curling away in gleams of sudden silver under stark trees into the night. A few minutes later the bulk of a big woman in a white apron appeared at the stile. "Could you take the box in?" said a gentle voice. "Dad's crippled." Alf swaggered.