As he watched her now, rushing upstairs like a young Maenad, he remembered how the fancy had come into his mind, that afternoon at Poll’s Camp, that the West-Saxon Torp blood in her had been crossed at some very early stage with an altogether different strain.

Hurriedly gathering the dishes together on the edge of the sink, he proceeded to do what would certainly not have passed unobserved by a more practical mistress of the house. He proceeded to hold cups, saucers, plates, bowls, knives, forks, and pots and pans under a tap of perfectly cold water, rubbing them and scraping them with his bare fingers, and then drying them violently⁠—greasy as most of them were⁠—with the kitchen-towel. As he did this, he caught a glimpse out of the window of a stunted little laburnum-tree, which grew in their backyard; and he noticed, as he had often noticed before, how one of its boughs was leafless and seemed to be stretching out, in a sorrowful, fumbling sort of way, towards their neighbour’s fence, above which grew a sturdy lilac-bush, covered now with glossy heart-shaped leaves.