For a man bent on making a secret departure our gentleman in the three-cornered hat must be accounted unlucky, for at least three pairs of ears, besides those of the landlord and the deserted lady, listened to the sound of his vanishing horses. Mr Bailey’s daughter, for one, had needed no waking. She had lain for an hour or more listening to her own heart-beats, and feeling at intervals her child stirring in the womb, before the noise of footsteps tiptoeing past her door recalled her to a sense of where she was. The moment before, her thoughts had been with her dark slim honey-tongued lover: that romantic creature who looked, they said, like a gipsy, but could talk (whispered her heart) like a prince in a fairy-tale. She was remembering an August evening when she had wandered across Dyking Common into that fairy-tale. She saw him in the near distance driving his geese into their pen. He waved to her and waited. And it was this attitude of waiting that piqued her curiosity. There was no impudence in it: there was only a quiet satisfaction, as though they were already old friends and this a planned meeting. Nor did he approach her: that would have sent her running. He stood and smiled a welcome, and she from a little distance watched him with wide eyes. So this was the famous Gipsy Noke. She had seen him many a time in the street, but here he was different, here he was curiously a part of nature: and the best part. The bright grass, the trees, the bending blue sky: these seemed his natural setting: he was their comrade and their equal. She turned her gaze to the ground and sauntered slowly by, afraid lest he should pursue her, yet loth to leave him. She was not quite unintelligent, but her intelligence now was quiescent. Her behaviour was all but involuntary, for her mind formed no image of what she feared or of what she wanted. Two instincts working in her, a dumb fear and a dumb desire, she was deaf to the small, lisping, infant voice of reason. Her feet brought her to a standstill; her head turned; her eyes looked. The man’s dark eyes were still watching her. He smiled and called: ‘Come and lend a hand with these geese, missy, wilta now?’ He needed no help, but she went to him without further hesitation. ‘I pen they in for why?’ said Noke, serenely at his ease. ‘Because there be handy folk about, that’s for why, my dear. I pen they in, so there’ll be a squawken if em’s tampered with.’ He smiled at her. His eyes were bright with geniality and excitement. His speech fascinated her. She had never met anyone so queerly attractive. ‘You’re not of these parts, are you?’ she said shyly. ‘Nay,’ he answered, with a hint of teasing. ‘I be the King of Ameriky. They do call me a gipsy hereabouts. But you’ll call me Harry, wilta now, seeing we be friends, my pretty?’ She was too much excited to answer: the dark warmth of his glance made her tingle, mind and body. ‘You be Mus Bailey’s girl, bainta?’ She nodded. ‘Ah,’ said he, ‘come you into my cot, darlen, and see where I do live.’ He held out a hand to her. She was suddenly afraid, and wanted to run away. But she wanted, too, to stay. And she stayed. She was a true daughter of Wooma, and he a true son of Koor; but the centuries had taught the man more than the woman. He knew whither they were both tending: she knew nothing but a consciousness of delicious danger. And now her ignorance was half-wilful: she shut out thought, and drifted on the tide of an agelong impulse. Agelong, primitive, but not simple: an impulse, baffling in its complexity, whose direction we see but whose nature is not to be encompassed by any man’s definition, whether mystic or moralist or man of science. The biologist will draw you a map of its behaviour; the psychologist will explore its ramifications; the poet will find in the mystery the beauty and meaning he himself has put there. And it may be that the poet, who has the last word, had also the first; and that the word became flesh; and that flesh is the hieroglyphic of a mind in labour. ‘Come in now,’ said Harry Noke; and his hand, strong and persuasive, closed on hers. She struggled to free herself, but he only laughed, and she quickly gave up the struggle. She shrank from entering the cot, but she entered it willingly, and even, despite her dragging feet, eagerly. The place enchanted her: both its outward and inward aspects were a surprise and a delight. It was a one-roomed shanty built round the trunk of a great oak. It had an uneven boarded floor, raised from the ground (said its maker proudly) by large stones. On the tree-trunk, which was the centre and support of the whole structure, hung various kitchen utensils: a frying-pan, a saucepan, a kettle, and a pint jug. Outside, surrounding the whole, a ditch had been dug; and the site was a good one—the flat summit of a small natural eminence. At their entry, a large lean dog came bounding from his corner to greet them, and a voice said: ‘Pretty fellow!’ Noke’s parrot could say no more than that, but two well-chosen words can give a man perennial satisfaction. Letitia was startled, and her hand involuntarily clung to the fingers enclosing it. ‘Oh, it’s only a parrot,’ she said. ‘What a beauty!’ The place was warm and dim and filled with a strong smell of hay. ‘And so be you, my blossom,’ answered the prince of this darkness. His arm came round her. ‘You be a rare body of beauty, Tisha Bailey.’ She had been told substantially the same not seldom before, but never had the flattery seemed so sweet, nor induced in her so wild a hunger for more. In the past, a few light kisses had been all her knowledge of love; but now, body and soul, she felt herself burning, melting, liquefying, until she was all responsiveness. . . . This she had been remembering, and much more, as she lay and tossed in her bed and waited for sleep to visit her with quietness: how his eyes had shone in the darkness, how his hands had stroked her face, and how shy she had been of the dog’s presence, till the soft golden rain of her lover’s talk fell on her naked bosom and flooded her heart. This she had been remembering when that sound roused her from reverie: footsteps going past her door and descending the stairs, and then, after an interval tense with listening, the sound of horses. ‘I wonder who that can be? Is anyone ill?’