One autumn, after a rainy, reedy summer, a summer of losses, Mr. Rosevear was forced to believe he could work the farm with fewer labourers; and young Byron, being the last to join the little band of hinds, must be the first to go. The lad took his dismissal hardly. By dewing the land with his sweat he had made it his and, against his will, a deep and narrow will, he could not be disinherited. He considered himself as much part of Wastralls as a bush of tamarisk in the hedge. As, however, he must go, he listened to his foster-father’s suggestion and returned temporarily to the great waters which had spewed him up. He went, but in every ship’s wake, in the reek of foreign cities, in the wind that blew from home, he saw visions of those few fields which to him were the world. He had the inward eye of the dreamer and, as the year turned, saw spring drawing her green skirts over the hillside and hanging the orchard with her gossamers. He saw the dandelions starring the thick grass by the river, the lush dark grass in which he had rolled himself moved by the ecstasy of life; and to him the salt sea was barren and unprofitable, a desert upon which he must go to and fro until the days of his pilgrimage were accomplished. The death of old Byron brought the wanderer back to Hindoo Cottage—as the fish-cellars were called—only to find that the wife had followed her man; and that he—Leadville the younger—was again without even the semblance of a human tie. He had not loved the old couple, love did not at any time come easily to him and all the emotion of which he was capable had long been concentrated upon Wastralls; but he was anxious to secure his foster-father’s berth as teamster. To the outpourings of the neighbours he listened unheeding and presently took his way to the farmhouse, there to learn that Rosevear had been laid in a neater ditch than that of his inadvertent choice and that Sabina—big, ripe, fair, a woman who might have stepped out of the Elizabethan age—reigned in his stead. The opportunity was self-evident and Byron, back in his place and once more happy, soon realized that his heart’s desire was within reach. It was not Sabina that he wanted but Wastralls; and that, again, not for ambition’s sake, but because his late experience had taught him the value of security. Asking no more of life than permission to spend his youth, his strength, his passion on the land, he found consent in Sabina’s awakening interest. She had disdained the easy-kindled fires of Tom, of Constantine, and of the Tregols lads, but the sombre glow in Byron’s eyes was disturbing. It moved her as something unknown and full of a strange promise, that promise which is in the rising sap and germinating seed. The neighbours expressed a kindly apprehension, for though marriage between persons of different race may be eugenically sound, it seldom brings happiness to the individual; but Sabina was beyond reason, for in the stranger she had found her mate.