Meanwhile Ed-me-boy, having despaired of Loppy’s help, was still moving the low benches about in lines by the tables. He was busy as usual but his mouth was tight and he did not speak. He had been silent like this since the disastrous autumn days when he had disappeared. He had been sent out with a sickle to clear the weeds from round the Hall’s beehives, which stood under a shelter against the back wall of the cow sheds. When he did not reappear at supper, Tom became anxious and called and called, and then Rob went round to the beehives and found all the weeds neatly cut down and piled up and the sickle across the top of a skep, but no Ed-me-boy. For three days there was a search and Tom had been distracted. Had the boy drowned in a ditch? All ditches were searched. Had he got lost in the forest? But why should he have gone into the forest? Had he gone up to Rockwell for some reason? But no one at Rockwell had seen him. Then on the third evening through the pouring rain he staggered into the Hall, banging the great door, soaked to the skin, crying and exhausted. Tom, like the Prodigal Son’s father, would have killed a fatted calf had he owned one. As it was he made Ed-me-boy a bed of clean straw by the fire, stripped off his soaked tunic and boots, wrapped him in his own cloak and fed him with warm soup from Joan’s pot, and fended off all enquiries of, ‘Where have you been?’

It came out later, and bit by bit, that he had decided he must go and see Annie, the rose-faced miller’s daughter in Rutherford, and having finished the beehive clearing, had run away through the orchard and taken the now familiar path to Rutherford, where he arrived during the night. It was a disastrous visit. What had gone on between him and Annie on the occasion of his taking back the empty panniers, no one ever knew, but this time his hopes of any further relationship were at once dashed. He had presented himself at Rutherford mill, Annie was sent up into the loft and the miller told Ed-me-boy very clearly to go home, that he would not dream of giving his pretty daughter to the seventeen-year-old son of a hall servant somewhere up the valley – so he said and that anyway Annie had long been promised to a proper steady young man with a field of his own and prospects of a team of oxen, and Annie was brought down and made to confirm in her father’s presence that this was so – and, yes, perhaps she should have told Ed-me-boy this when he last came, but somehow she had not, and perhaps he did not give her time to speak, but Ed-me-boy saw tears in her exquisite eyes as she repudiated him. So he had walked all the way home in the rain with his heart broken, and it had not mended since, and the brazen advances of that slut Sal Fletcher just sickened him.