When they picked themselves up to resume work, Dick muttered, ‘I’ll rest a bit longer – I feel a bit queer.’ He lay there with his head on an oak root, for a long time.

In mid-afternoon Hilda came to Marion to ask for help, her lips trembled as she spoke. ‘I think he can’t walk much. Will Peter and Hodge help him home?’

In the end Peter and Hodge half led and half carried Dick down the path and through the village. By the bridge he collapsed, semiconscious. They fetched a hurdle and lifted him on to it and with great difficulty carried him home over the Common with Hilda and the two frightened children following. Meanwhile up in the fields Marion finished her day’s haymaking as soon as she could, humped Alice on her back and set off for home. At the ash tree she paused for a moment, then turned aside from her own cottage and went to Hilda’s. The door, west facing, was fully open, so it was light inside. Hilda sat on a log close to the bed. Dick was lying there, eyes shut, breathing unevenly. Hilda glanced up at once as Marion’s form took the light from the interior. ‘Look,’ she whispered, all in horror.

Marion went in. Dick’s right arm lay beside him, naked, unbandaged, so hugely swollen that it no longer resembled an arm, purple and red in patches with a greenish yellow area round the ball of the thumb.

‘He screamed when they lifted him off the hurdle,’ Hilda said, her voice grating as much as his breathing. ‘He hasn’t moved since; he can’t speak,’ and she stopped as if to bank down her rising hysteria.

‘It’s poisoned,’ said Marion. ‘All that yellow is the poison.’ She spoke firmly as she looked at Hilda. ‘There’s no one here and no time to lose – we’ll have to do it ourselves. We must cut the wound and get the poison out. Where’s the sharpest knife you’ve got? And where’s the herb potion?’

Marion had sharpened the knife on the stone threshold. She did not dare wait for any other help as the light was beginning to go. Hilda was to hold his arm still with all her strength and Marion would cut round the hole made by the sliver. Of course, at the touch of Hilda’s hands Dick roared and wrenched it away, but Hilda held firm and Marion made two large cuts in the thumb, enlarging the wound so a great deal of the yellow pus came out. They tried again but could not hold him, and Hilda’s tears were blinding her in this act of torturing her lover. They had to give up. They hoped most of the poison had come out, but doubted it, the whole arm was so swollen. All they could do now was to drip the herb potion on to the wound.

He lay semiconscious, the two women watching him. The little girls sat in the growing dusk, watching too, not daring to speak or move, holding the sleeping Alice between them. It was almost quite dark when Marion picked up Alice, told Hilda to send for her in the night if she was needed and went back to her own cottage.