FORE:Sometimes Caro in her innocence would think that she ought to speak to Rose, warn her, and plead with her to go carefully. But a vague fright sealed her lips, and she was held at a distance by the reserve in which the merry communicative Rose had suddenly wrapped herself. Those few minutes by the brookside had changed her, though it would be hard to say exactly in what the change lay. Caro was both repelled and baffled by it. A more skilled observer would say that Rose had become suddenly adult in her outlook as well as her emotions. For the first time she had seen in its sorrowful reality the force which she had played with for so many years. The shock disorganised her, drove her into a strange silence. Love and she had always been hail-fellow-well-met, they had romped and rollicked together through life; she had never thought that her good comrade could change, or rather��more unimaginable still��that she should suddenly discover that she had never really known him.Evening came, the dusk fell, stars floated up out of[Pg 347] the mists that piled themselves along the shore, the bleat of sheep came from the marsh, and the eye of Dungeness Lighthouse flashed off the Point into the fogs. Inland the country was wrapt in a tender haze, perfumed with hops and harvest. The moon rose above the Fivewatering, and bronzed the dark masses of wood huddling northward. The scented wind seemed to sigh to him of a woman's hair and lips, of the softness of a woman's hand in his, of her silly little voice talking love and nonsense. But the house in Wish Ward was shut to him��perfidious woman had added yet another perfidy to her score. For about the twentieth time his love dream had been shattered. Now she was eating pickled herrings with another man.

FORE:"His abominable farm��he gets every bit of work out of us he can, till we're justabout desperate����"

FORE:"What time?��and I'll promise father shall be here to see you."

FORE:"No."

FORE:He was now twenty-seven, looking in some ways strangely older, in others far younger, than his age. The boy in him had not had much chance of surviving adolescence. Life had come down too hard on him. A grim struggle does not nourish youth, and mentally Reuben was ten or twelve years ahead of twenty-seven. His splendid health and strength, however, had maintained a physical boyishness, expressing itself in zeal and high spirits, a keen appetite, a boundless capacity for work, an undaunted enterprise. He was always hungry, he fell asleep directly his head touched the pillow, and slept like a child beside the tossing and wakeful Naomi.

FORE: