But Jinny was not altogether outmanoeuvred, for while Mr. Skindle was getting his case of utensils, she filled up the rest of her seat—it was a stuffed seat covered with sacking—by means of a peculiarly precious parcel, needing a vigilant eye: no new device this, but her habitual protection against bores or adorers, and Skindle, she feared, was both. This swain-chaser or maid-protector was kept in a corner of the cart ready for emergencies, being an elongated package of stones, marked “Fragile.” The stones had to be jagged and uncouth or Nip would have squatted on it and roused suspicion. This was the only parcel she lifted herself, and it figured in her own mind as “The Scarecrow.”

And so, despite Mr. Skindle’s offer to nurse it on his knees, she put him behind her—not as a Satan, for his seductiveness was small. He had, it is true, a good styside manner, and his slim figure, outlined by a trimly cut pepper-and-salt suit, effused a sense of vitality. But his straw-coloured moustache, which was not without its female votaries, was for Jinny more of a puzzle than a decoration, for she could not reconcile its flowingness with the desolating baldness that any shifting of his cap revealed. His cranium was, in fact, like the advertisement of a hair-restorer in the picture preceding the application thereof. As fixed a feature of his face as the grey cap which concealed his calvity was the black cutty pipe stuck in his stained teeth, nor had Jinny ever seen him without a large pearl horseshoe pin in his tie.

“Please don’t smoke,” she said, as he climbed in by the tail-board, “Gran’fer would smell it.”

“And why shouldn’t he?”

“He’s a Wesleyan.”

“Oh!” He laughed without comprehension, a shade scoffingly.

“And the smell might get into people’s parcels,” she added.

Bestowing himself under the tilt as well as he could on a box, grazed at his side by a ledge he considered too narrow to sit on, and threatened with decapitation through a plank holding the smaller parcels that ran athwart the cart just above his head, Mr. Skindle gazed up over this shelf at the glorious view of the back of Jinny’s bonnet and feasted his eyes on her graceful dorsal curves and the more variegated motions of her driving arm, not to mention the succession of lovely rural backgrounds made for her figure by the arch of the awning. And his ill-humour melted, and though his pipe grew cold his heart began to glow. But Jinny took no more notice of him than if he had been himself a box. No wonder he began to feel closed and corded up, bursting though he knew himself to be with soul-riches. For a full mile, his extinct pipe in his teeth, he heard only the monotonous snap of Methusalem’s hoofs as if everything along the road was snapping in a frost. The unjaded steed had actually started off at almost a trot, and as the Gaffer explained once, “a hoss what has long lopes knocks his fitten together.” Then—as if to mark how completely her passenger was forgotten—one of her grandfather’s songs began to steal from her lips. It was not “High Barbary” nor “Admiral Benbow,” nor yet his favourite “Oi’m seventeen come Sunday,” which the nonagenarian sang daily with growing conviction. It was—and Nip would have been the first to be surprised, had he understood it—the old English air:

Perhaps it was the influence of her horn; perhaps she was an artist who could enjoy in song what she could not suffer in life. Or perhaps she loved the lilt of the old song and never thought of the meaning, or only of the bravery of the spectacle and the gay coming of the dawn. For, all untrained as she was, she vibrated peculiarly to music, and one of the wonderful moments of her young life was when she first heard a hymn sung in parts at the Sunday-school; to her ear, accustomed only to the solo quavering of the Gaffer, was revealed harmony; a starry new universe and a blood-tickling enchantment in one.

Almost at the first outbreak of the hunting song Nip appeared at a run, and with two bounds he established himself in his mistress’s lap—invidiously enough in Elijah’s eyes. For that silvery little voice, rippling along the lonely road with the unconscious joyance of a blackbird’s, completed the spell which the spring landscape—seen in that series of pictures framed by the arch of the tilt—was weaving on the doomed veterinary surgeon.

There were sheep, big and little, lying in the wide fields and great, newly ploughed spaces of red, freshly turned earth—for the first time Elijah felt the scarecrows as a degradation of all this primeval beauty. Apple-trees flowered in the cottage gardens and in the hedges was early May-blossom, and on the brinks primroses, anemones, and even a few precocious bluebells rioted in an intoxicating fertility of beauty. Larks rose palpitating with song, bumble-bees boomed, butterflies flittered, and ever and anon came the haunting cry of the cuckoo. And when Jinny’s voice soared up too, Elijah Skindle’s heart seemed melting down his spine.