“Mr. Spalding hasn’t turned up, has he?” inquired Maisie, a sudden gleam of interest in her eye.

Cicely blushed ever so faintly.

“’Course not. He won’t either, thank goodness! I’ve been talking to an aborigine.”

“Oh!” yawned Maisie, and returned to her book.

CICELY rather wondered whether Talbot would come at all, but he did, and stayed for over an hour. Maisie objected strongly to him, but then, Cicely reflected, Maisie was in the mood to object to anything. She was “bored stiff” with the country. So was Cicely, but she would not admit it.

For a fortnight it had been glorious. They had gloated over the quaint old village and told one another that they could live here content for months. At the end of the next week the simple life had begun to pall on them. There was no tennis and no society. The atmosphere began to be rather tense between the girls.

So Cicely welcomed the diversion in the shape of Fred Talbot. Maisie complained that he brought mud into the house. Cicely told her that she needn’t speak of Talbot as though he were a dog. Maisie retorted that that was just what he was—a shaggy, uncouth sheepdog.

As Talbot came more and more frequently to Rose Cottage, Maisie, to show her disgust, retired either to her room or to the neighbouring woods.

So engrossed was Cicely in Talbot’s farm that it never occurred to her that she was encouraging Talbot to fall in love with her. She was not at all flirtatious, and not one of her numerous adorers would have taken her frank, unaffected friendliness for anything other than it was meant to be.

But Talbot was not a society man; neither was he used to the ways of a Cicely Carruthers. The girls he knew belonged to the village of Blythe, or its environs, and were fifty years or so behind the times. This was his first experience of the modern girl. At first he was a little shocked at the free and easy way in which she wandered into his place, or invited him into hers; then he was no longer shocked, but thought he understood. He came still more frequently to Rose Cottage.

Another fortnight slipped by. Maisie had sunk into a sort of sullen apathy, but Cicely, tanned by the sun, and pulsing with energy, was on the road to becoming the complete farmer. She had come to associate Talbot merely with his farm. Had he but known it, she was treating him as her inferior in that she still called him Mr. Talbot, and confined her conversation to farming.

She had a rude awakening. She came into the cottage one afternoon, her hair dishevelled by the wind, and her shoes caked in mud, and collapsed into a chair.

“Oo! I am tired!” she remarked.

Maisie raised her eyes from the inevitable novel.

“I don’t wonder at it if you will go mucking about a dirty farm,” she said.

Cicely was roused to wrath.