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Men were at work here and there—for it was the season for ‘taking up’ the meadows, or digging the little waterways clear for the winter irrigation, and mending their banks where trodden down by the cows. The shovelfuls of loam, black as jet, brought there by the river when it was as wide as the whole valley, were an essence of soils, pounded champaigns of the past, steeped, refined, and subtilized to extraordinary richness, out of which came all the fertility of the mead, and of the cattle grazing there.

Clare hardily kept his arm round her waist in sight of these watermen, with the air of a man who was accustomed to public dalliance, though actually as shy as she who, with lips parted and eyes askance on the labourers, wore the look of a wary animal the while.

‘You are not ashamed of owning me as yours before them!’ she said gladly.

‘O no!’

‘But if it should reach the ears of your friends at Emminster that you are walking about like this with me, a milkmaid———’

‘The most bewitching ever seen.’

‘They might feel it a hurt to their dignity.’