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“None at all, Dolly.” He was quite radiant again. “If I didn’t love you so, I wouldn’t mind what that other chap said or did. And if I could only think that you cared more for me than for him–“

“I do, Adam.”

“God bless you for saying so! You’ve lightened my heart, Dolly. I have to go to Portsmouth for the firm today. To-morrow night I’ll come and see you.”

“Very well, Adam, I–Oh, my God, what’s that!”

A rending breaking noise in the distance, a dull rumble, and a burst of shouts and cries.

“The rick’s down! There’s been an accident!” They both started running down the hill.

“Father!” panted the girl, “father!”

“He’s all right!” shouted her companion, “I can see him. But there’s some one down. They’re lifting him now. And here’s one running like mad for the doctor.”

A farm-labourer came rushing wildly up the lane. “Don’t you go, Missey,” he cried. “A man’s hurt.”

“Who?”

“It’s Bill. The rick came down and the ridge-pole caught him across the back. He’s dead, I think. Leastwise, there’s not much life in him. I’m off for Doctor Strong!” He bent his shoulder to the wind, and lumbered off down the road.

“Poor Bill! Thank God it wasn’t father!” They were at the edge of the field now in which the accident had taken place. The rick lay, a shapeless mound upon the earth, with a long thick pole protruding from it, which had formerly supported the tarpaulin drawn across it in case of rain. Four men were walking slowly away, one shoulder humped, one hanging, and betwixt them they bore a formless clay-coloured bundle. He might have been a clod of the earth that he tilled, so passive, so silent, still brown, for death itself could not have taken the burn from his skin, but with patient, bovine eyes looking out heavily from under half-closed lids. He breathed jerkily, but he neither cried out nor groaned. There was something almost brutal and inhuman in his absolute stolidity. He asked no sympathy, for his life had been without it. It was a broken tool rather than an injured man.

“Can I do anything, father?”

“No, lass, no. This is no place for you. I’ve sent for the doctor. He’ll be here soon.”

“But where are they taking him?”

“To the loft where be sleeps.”

“I’m sure he’s welcome to my room, father.”

“No, no, lass. Better leave it alone.”

But the little group were passing as they spoke, and the injured lad had heard the girl’s words.

“Thank ye kindly, Missey,” he murmured, with a little flicker of life, and then sank back again into his stolidity and his silence.

Well, a farm hand is a useful thing, but what is a man to do with one who has an injured spine and half his ribs smashed. Farmer Foster shook his head and scratched his chin as he listened to the doctor’s report.

“He can’t get better?”

“No.”

“Then we had better move him.”

“Where to?”

“To the work’us hospital. He came from there just this time eleven years. It’ll be like going home to him.”

“I fear that he is going home,” said the doctor gravely. “But it’s out of the question to move him now. He must lie where he is for better or for worse.”

And it certainly looked for worse rather than for better. In a little loft above the stable he was stretched upon a tiny blue pallet which lay upon the planks. Above were the gaunt rafters, hung with saddles, harness, old scythe blades–the hundred things which droop, like bats, from inside such buildings. Beneath them upon two pegs hung his own pitiable wardrobe, the blue shirt and the grey, the stained trousers, and the muddy coat. A gaunt chaff-cutting machine stood at his head, and a great bin of the chaff behind it. He lay very quiet, still dumb, still uncomplaining, his eyes fixed upon the small square window looking out at the drifting sky, and at this strange world which God has made so queerly–so very queerly.