But though the ground was thus prepared for his advent, Will did not come. “What are you prinkin’ yourself for?” her grandfather asked in the morning. “It ain’t your day.” It was certainly not her day. It was more like a night—a long agony of expectation with every rustle of wind on the dead leaves sounding like his footstep. Towards dusk she even swept the water-logged landscape with the now neglected telescope. If she did not find him, she found—what was almost as soothing—a reason for his not coming. The broken bridge! How could he go all those miles round? Joyfully she called herself a fool, and awaited the letter he would send instead. The letter would fill up the Thursday and on the Friday she would go to him.

But even this milder expectation of a visit from Bundock went unfulfilled. At first she thought with some relief that Bundock was again shirking the circuit. But no! The glass revealed the slave of duty serving Beacon Chimneys. Throwing on her jacket, but bonnetless, she ran across the Common to meet her letter. But Bundock only gave her grumbles at the overstrain on his feet, and leaving him, to hide her dismay, she walked blindly up Beacon Hill till she was startled to come upon Master Peartree in the bosom of his new-born flock. It did not even occur to her that this was a proof he had escaped the flood, and that the occasion called for congratulation. But the sight of his lambs bounding and his ewes scooping out mangolds brought to mind his old account of a sheep that had broken its arm “in a roosh,” and at once a second rush of joy at her silliness and a still more paradoxical pleasure in Will’s broken arm flooded her soul. How could he write, the poor boy? It was not that she had really forgotten the state of his arm—indeed, she had thought of the sling as clogging the springiness of his walk, and making it still more impossible for him to come—only she must be going crazy again, she felt; just as in the days when she had taken home wedding-cakes and brought Elijah hairpins. Her eyes now filled with happy tears and, joyous as the yeanlings whose tails vibrated with such voluptuous velocity as they sucked, she gave chase to a little black lamb and kissed its sable nose.

That brought her thoughts back to the flood by way of Mother Gander’s hostelry and its drowned landlord, and she inquired at last about Master Peartree’s losses. They had been limited to one bullock, she was glad to hear, though no such glow of Christian feeling possessed her as she had recommended to her grandfather, when the shepherd-cowman proceeded to estimate that what with stacks, root-crops, and winter-wheat, Farmer Gale was the poorer by several thousand pounds. Other shepherds had been badly hit, but he himself—thanks to the Almighty—had got more twins and triplets than ever, and taking her round his plaza of straw he showed her the yellow-splashed, long-legged lambkins in the thatched pens, one set of which he would have to feed by bottle, for handsome mothers did not give the most milk, he moralized.

She ran homewards as full of the joy of life as the leaping lambs, though she was living only for the morrow. Through the frosty air she felt a first breath of spring, birds were singing, and even beginning to build, and the flood, she was sure, was falling. But when next day she reached Rosemary Villa, the gaunt drudge informed her that only the old Flynts were in! Her heart turned to lead. So he had not stayed in for her, though she, for her part, had raced to him by the shortest routes, irrespective of business, cutting through Chipstone proper by a single side-street. It was not till she had learnt that he was gone, like Elijah and all the world, to Mr. Mott’s funeral, that her heart grew light again—she seemed to batten on tragedies these days. Of course Will could not avoid this mark of respect, he who had always put up his coach in the courtyard of “The Black Sheep,” and perhaps she ought to have gone to the funeral too, and would probably have encountered it had she not skipped the High Street in her eagerness. She remembered now some lowered blinds in the street she had scuttled through, and a slow booming bell, whose disregarded notes now at last donged their message to her brain. But perhaps it was better so—her redeemed frock was too gay, her winter shawl and bonnet without a single touch of black. She ought to have borne the inevitable funeral in mind though, she told herself reproachfully. In her present guise she could hardly station even in the courtyard. It was fortunate “Mother Gander” no longer expected to see her within. How embarrassing it would have been for the widow to meet the confidante of her unmeasured denunciations! Probably the whole place would be closed for the day, though she supposed the Chelmsford coach with the passengers from London would have to come in as usual.

Apprised by the barking of Nip, the Flynt couple had descended, looking uneasy, for they had been speaking of her not long before. Their hostess-drudge had started the ball as she closed the door upon Will, outward bound for the funeral. “You’d think he’d found a fortune, not lost one,” the melancholy creature had commented, warmed by that youthful sunshine. “I reckon he wasn’t happy hartin’ Jinny’s business,” Caleb had surmised. “And to be happy is as good as a fortune.” Upon which Martha, who was equally in the passage “to see Will off,” had surprised them by a sudden sob. “She’s thinkin’ of that poor drownded young man,” Caleb had apologized, leading her gently upstairs. “Oi do hope Will’ll keep a proper face for the funeral.”

That appropriate face, however, had continued to be Martha’s, and the explanation thereof when they were alone had surprised Caleb more than the sob.

“I knew she’d rob me of Will. I knew it from the first moment she wanted to read his letter to me.”

“Rob you of him!”

“They’re in love. Are you blind?”

“You don’t say! Lord! Little Jinny! Why, she’s a baiby!”

“A cunning woman. Came after him even when you’d have thought he was safe behind the flood! This letter will be all that’s left to me! You mark my words!”

“Don’t, dear heart. You’re wettin’ the letter—it’ll spile. But dedn’t Oi leave my mother to come to you, as the Book commands?”

“That’s different. He’s all I’ve got. I can’t trust him to Jinny—she’s too flighty—always singing.”

“Sow’s the birds, but look what noice nests they make! ’Tain’t as if ’twas that Purley gal as Bundock warned us of, allus lookin’ at herself like a goose in a pond. We ought to be thankful as Will’s showed sow much sense. There’s plenty o’ good farmers along the road, but there’s no weeds to Jinny even three fields back.”

“I don’t wonder you go kissing her! Pity you can’t marry her yourself!”

“Oi’d have no chance agin Will’s looks, dear heart. He takes arter his mother, ye see.”

Dulcifying as this jocose finale had proved, it did not diminish the awkwardness of now meeting Jinny, but Martha, who had not even the consolation of finding an Ecclesia flourishing in Chipstone, was anxious to hear how far the flood had subsided from their beloved Frog Farm. They were both experiencing all the pangs of exile, aggravated by the discomforts of a house with monotonously boarded floors, forbiddingly fine furniture, and light and water coming unnaturally out of taps, and their grievances and yearnings for a return to reality now monopolized a conversation which Jinny strove in vain to divert to Will. She was reduced to looking at her cart for indications of the depths she had splashed through unobservantly, and could extract nothing about Will except that he insisted on paying for their board and lodging, and that this would surely take his last penny. “He’ll have to look for a job now, he’ll have no time or money to think of foolishness,” Martha told her meaningly. But this broad hint conveyed nothing to her. In her affection for the old woman it never occurred to her that she would not make a welcome daughter-in-law, now the competition was over. And knowing as a scientific fact that your ears burned if people had been talking of you—whereas hers had been tingling with the frost—she went away, all unsuspicious, in quest of the coveted young man.

The funeral was over now, she saw from the many coaches returning singly or in procession through and from the High Street. Surely the grandest funeral ever known (she thought), doubtless out of consideration for so tragic a passing, though somewhat confusing to the moral of her Spelling-Book. Elijah, whom she met changing from a coach into his trap, confirmed her impression of grandeur, and looked forward—on grounds of special information—to the toning up of the churchyard with a monument as big as money could buy, surmounted by angels, “not weeping, mind you, but blowing trumpets like Will’s.” Elijah wore a beautiful new top-hat, flat-brimmed and funereally braided. “Very lucky I had just got it for my wedding,” he confided to her.

“You won’t forget to take off the braid?” she smiled. “And when is it to be?”

“We’re having the banns read next Sunday. Blanche won’t wait a day longer, though I’m so frightfully busy through the flood—it’s a regular gold-stream.”

“And how’s Mr. Flynt’s arm?” she asked.

“He won’t let me see it now—I never knew such an obstinate pig. He’s gone to Dr. Mint.”

“What, just now?”

“No, no, he’s gone home—to Rosemary Villa, I mean.”

As soon as he was out of sight, Jinny turned Methusalem’s head back to the Villa. She hung about uncomfortably for some minutes in the thought that Will might be coming along or would be looking out of a window. But after ten unpleasant minutes she descended from her seat and fumbled shyly with the new brass knocker, feeling far more brazen than it. She almost cowered before the upstanding figure of the septuagenarian Mrs. Skindle—it vaguely reminded her of Britannia with a broom—but stammering out that she had forgotten to ask if the Villa needed anything, she ascertained that Will had not returned. To pitch her cart at the door was impossible, to go to meet him might lead to missing him, so there was nothing for it but desperately to prolong the conversation till he should reach home. Her tactics proved fatal, for her cheerful reference to Elijah’s coming marriage loosed upon her a deluge of hysterical tears, and she found herself the confidante of sorrows as tragic as Mrs. Mott’s. Poor Mrs. Skindle, throwing herself upon this sympathetic outsider, so providential a vent for her surcharged emotions, vociferated that all her children had abandoned her, that she was to be put away in the poorhouse. In vain Jinny, standing in that bleak passage, her heart astrain for Will’s coming, strove to assuage a grief which irritated rather than touched her. She could hardly bring her mind to bear upon this creature with the broom, so inopportune and irrelevant did the outburst seem, so sordid a shadow on her own romance. With surface words she assured the poor woman that all this was only in her imagination. But Mrs. Skindle, though admitting she had only divined it, kept iterating that a nod was as good as a wink, and that she wasn’t even a blind horse. Her son had gone to see Blanche on the Wednesday and had come back with the announcement of his marriage next month, and Blanche had made it a condition that his old mother should be put away. “She’d pison me, if she wasn’t afraid for her swan’s neck. And so I’ve got to be put out o’ sight. ’Tain’t as if I can’t earn my bread with this broom and duster, but she’s too grand to have me charin’ in Chipstone.”

“Well, then, what prevents you going somewhere else?” Jinny asked impatiently.

“I can’t go traipsin’ about to new places and new faces at my age. And I don’t want to go agin ’Lijah neither—he ought to ha’ been married long since, and wasn’t it me spurred him on to look that high? And won’t he have the loveliest wife in Chipstone? What’s your game, trying to drive me away? Why, if I leave Chipstone I’d never see my grandchicks.”

“Well, but would you see them anyhow, even supposing they’re hatched?”

“I reckon there’s days I’d be allowed out and I could see ’em as they went by in their baby-cart.”

“Well, at that rate you’d be happier in the poorhouse.”

“Yes,” with a burst of weeping, “I’d be happier there. Happen I’d better go there.”

“But I don’t believe your son will let you,” Jinny reassured her, and tore herself away, miserably conscious of a sort of Nemesis for her strategic lingering. She dismissed the scene from her mind. But it added to the heaviness of her heart as she drove slowly about the streets with never a glimpse of the face she sought, and the ache of his absence began to be complicated by the fear that it was wilful, or at least not unavoidable. Surely it was not possible for three days to elapse without their meeting, had he been as keen as she. Even the funeral, she now felt grimly, was not an absolute necessity of life! He could have got out of it. No, there was something behind, more sinister than funerals. She went anxiously over her one brief episode of happiness. Had she done or said anything to offend him? Was it that, on reflection, he had resented the little trick she had played at the flooded farm in luring him outside his door? Yes, that must be it. And she had sillily rubbed it in with her last words: “You bet your bottom dollar on that!” But no, he could hardly be resenting the innocent device without which they would never have known the wonder of their first kiss. The wonder? But was it a wonder to him? Tumultuous thoughts of Blanche and more shadowy others tore at her bosom. He did not really care, did not really need her.

The sport of elemental passions, she drove vaguely around, hoping against hope to espy him. She was a creature of pure feeling—unsophisticated by fiction or drama—and darkling images of death came to her for the first time. And for the first time she let her work go undone. It was no mere apprehension of meeting “Mother Gander” that finally kept her from the courtyard of the inn, no mere sense that with the sweeping away of competition she could afford to neglect for once even the commissions she already held; it was the absolute distraction of her mind. She could have borne final separation more easily than this uncertainty.

As she jogged home, she realized miserably that Will had at last succeeded in stamping out her business, if only for a day.