The next year, Richard and Anne Backfield took a house at Playden for week-ends. Anne wanted to be near her relations at the Manor, and Richard, softened by prosperity, had no objection to returning to the scene of his detested youth.It never occurred to her to throw these young people together, and give the girl a chance of fighting her father and satisfying the vague longings for adventure and romance which had begun to put torment into her late twenties. She often told her it was a scandal that she had never been allowed to know men, but her own were too few and useful to be sacrificed to the forlorn. Besides, Caro had an odd shy way with men which sometimes made them laugh at her. She had little charm, and though not bad-looking in a heavy black-browed style, she had no feminine arts, and always appeared to the very worst advantage.
"Lookee, I'll carry youyou mustn't git wet."How dreadful! Already she saw an insect crawling over the bedprobably there were lots of others about the room; and these flowers, all parched, dead, and evil-smelling, gave a sinister touch to her wedding day. A lump rose in her throat, the back of her eyes was seared by something hot and sudden.... Oh, Harry ... Harry....The last piece of land had been exceptionally tough even for Boarzell. It was a high strip, running right across the Moor from the edge of the twenty-acre piece acquired in '67, over the high-road, to the borders of Doozes. The soil was amazingly variousit started in[Pg 267] the low grounds almost as clay, with runnels of red water in the irrigation ditches, then passing through a stratum of marl it became limish, grey and brittle, powdering under the spade. Reuben's ploughs tore over it, turning up earth of almost every consistency and colour, till the new ground looked like a smeared palette. Towards Doozes it became clay again, and here oats would grow, sedge-leaved and tulip-rooted, with puffy awns. On the crest was rubble, poor stuff where even the heather seemed to fight for existence."Don't you know me?" continued the siren, tilting her hat back from her face.
