“Met Donald in the clover field. He was very nice all the time, not difficult once.” She was happier in a way than she had ever been, yet it was the difference between being asleep and being awake. Her life, she now saw, had been dreamed away; it wasn’t living as she now knew the word living to mean. Clearness of vision had come with her awakening, and she saw everything with a sharp edge, there were no blurred outlines. The sun rose and she saw the beauty of each day so that it hurt. The rain came down, and it was no longer water pouring annoyingly out of the sky, but it made a grey world in which Donald with his energy and vigour stood out the more clearly. Sometimes when she was tired, or for a moment or two before going to sleep, she felt flickerings of fear. She loved Donald, completely and absolutely, but did he love her at all? He was interested in her, not a doubt of that. She was not stupid, and knew that all their meetings were not accidents. Iris told her this, even if she had not got on to it for herself. “Funny the way we always meet Daddy when we’re out. Usually you can look an’ look an’ look and you can never find him.” Ben, though apparently engrossed in his yard work, still had eyes for the goings-on of master. He would cast an apparently vacant glance at Iris and Janet as they went out, either on their way to the cottage, or for a walk, but once or twice he had given Janet a hint that he knew where her heart lay, and was on her side. “Master’s taking a great interest in they beans below the cottage seemingly,” or, “I knew ’e’d gone to the copse, shepherd tell me. So I tells master to have a look to the fence longside of that mustard.” She rather liked old Ben’s interest, for it showed he approved. She hoped he approved because he thought she would make Donald happy, rather than because, if Donald loved her, it would be a knock-out blow for Gladys, but she was afraid the latter was the more true. The trouble was that interest was not enough. Donald was interested, but that was passion. The kissing episode would have been only too easy to repeat. Janet was innocent, but nobody’s fool; she knew they wanted each other, but what did that mean? Hot summer weather and being physically attracted. That wasn’t love. Sometimes when she was thinking it seemed to her that Donald was like a dog on a lead, rushing out, full of eagerness to be brought up short by his chain, and because checked, retiring disgruntled to his kennel. But what was the chain? Was it the memory of Anna? Because his marriage with Anna had not been a success, was he afraid to tackle it again? Or was it Gladys? Was there anything between himself and Gladys to give her a claim to him? She was certainly possessive, and he was scared of her, but was there anything more than that? Any one of these reasonings seemed good, and yet Janet believed in none of them. “It’s something he doesn’t quite like in me,” she thought. “He doesn’t want to let himself get too fond of me.” She would run over in her head her blemishes. “Of course, I’m not pretty, but it’s not that, because obviously he likes me that way.”