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above him, wrapping him with huge tatters in the road.
    He was gone.

FIVE
    H e did not seem to have slept at all before strange noises, shoutings, silences, came and went in what he knew was dreaming. Strangely, actual seconds only made a dream of the reality from which, tossing, he had tried through the night to find surcease. They merged with dozing unbelief in his return – so ineffectual – and his presence in a place alienated which should have welcomed him. … Richard Milne rose, bumping his head upon the gable ceiling, and stepped to the open window.
    Dawn had come, lifting sharp colour from the fields. In a haze of level yellow sunshine on the dusty lane below, Carson Hymerson and his son manoeuvred and spoke, the voices ringing back from the shady, cliff-like barns at the far side of the yard. The skeleton of a hayrake stood between them, and they were fitting teeth into a long horizontal bar. Richard Milne had an impulse to laugh at the oblivious and loud-voiced preoccupation. Carson bent, showing patches on the back of faded clothes, clawed the air at one side of him without turning his head, and spoke with injured tones of imperial dudgeon.
    “There! You’ve let loose and they’re slipped out again. Give me that piece of wire! … Show ’em!”
    Arvin, a tall, bowed young man with prominent, aquiline features, went to the wire fence of the lane and lifted from it the piece which providentially hung there. His father viciously twisted the wire about the wooden bar and the rod on which the teeth were strung. It was evident that it would be impossible to insert the teeth between them.
    “Now! What you gawpin’ at me for? You’ve let the others loose, and now they’ve jumped out of the holes. If ever I see –”
    Arvin, who had been contemplating his father’s mistake, said nothing, but hastily jumped to the other end of the bar and held it against the teeth. His father continued to whine, until he said abruptly:
    “Well! You told me to get the wire, and now see what you’ve done.”
    “You’re too smart!” shouted his father without rancour. “It’s all your fault. You just think we shouldn’t be doing it ourselves, that’s all, and you won’t help.”
    The son digested this a moment, seeming about to speak, and then to think better of it.
    “It’s all right for you to talk,” went on the older man, turning the teeth of the rake on the steel rod delicately until they hung loosely in a perfect row. “Yes, eh, send it to the blacksmith; don’t do anything yourself for fear of getting your hands dirty. No, I’m not farming that way just yet. … I don’t say but what if I was gone, stowed away safe enough under ground, there’ll be enough of that goes on, but not just to-day, thank you, too rich for my blood. That ain’t how the old pioneers got along. If your grandfather could see the slouchy way you do things, he’d turn over in his grave. Reach me that chisel….”
    “Yeh, I bet he’d –”
    “Don’t you leave go!” yelled Hymerson. “People are getting more shiftless all the time. For a certainty.”
    Richard Milne stared half-awake from his window, and the argumentative, swift whine, with outbursts of shouting, the quiet, occasional remonstrance of the younger man ascended to him as though he were watching a play; until with a start he straightened and returned to bed. They even pursued him there. So he was back amid the oblivion of the farmer’s cares! It was a rousing reality. The possibility of sleep was gone for that night, and, seeing that it was nearly six o’clock according to the thin watch under his pillow, he dressed. In the kitchen he greeted Mrs. Hymerson, who was holding a slice of bread on a fork over the lidless hole of the wood stove.
    “I’ve been going to get me a regular toaster,” she remarked offhandedly, “but I haven’t got around to it yet.” Richard wondered what formalities connected with the man of the house would be necessary before this