But even Miss Constance was not quite so strange as the big fat man who wore the dark inverness cloak and soft black felt hat. He was a poet, Laura was told, and that was why he dressed like that and wore his hair so long. He came every market day, having walked from a village called Isledon, six or seven miles away, and, after puffing and blowing and mopping his brow, he would draw out a paper from his breast pocket and say, “I must read you this, Tom,” and Uncle Tom would say, “So you’ve been at it again. Oh, you poets!” To her great disappointment, although she listened intently, Laura could never grasp exactly what his poems were about. There were eagles in most of them, but not the kind of eagles she had read of, which circled over mountains and carried off lambs and babies; these eagles of his were eagles one moment and Pride or Hate the next; and if there were flowers in his poems he had always chosen the ugliest, such as nightshade or rue. But it all sounded very learned and grand, read in his rich, sonorous voice, and she had the comfort of knowing that, if she could not make much sense of it, her uncle could not either, for she heard him say many times: “You know I’m no judge of poetry. If it were prose now… But it’s certainly got a fine roll and swell to it. That I do know.”

After the reading, they would settle down to talk about flowers and birds and what was going on in the fields, for the poet loved all these, although he did not write about them. Or sometimes he would talk of his home and children and praise his wife for allowing him to come away into the country alone for a whole summer to write. “Shows she believes in you as a poet,” Uncle Tom said once, and the poet drew himself up from his chair and said, “She does and she’ll be justified, though perhaps not in my lifetime. Posterity will judge.”

“Fine words! Fine words!” said Uncle Tom after he had gone. “But I doubt it. I doubt.”

Less odd, and therefore less interesting to Laura, though dearer to her Uncle Tom’s heart, was the young doctor with the keen, eager face and grey eyes set deep under heavy dark brows. From what she heard then, she thought, looking back in after years, that he was trying to work up a practice and finding it heavy going. He certainly had a good deal of spare time.