Three days before the Grammar School was to reopen he had cajoled Gerda into accompanying him to Poll’s Camp. They had brought their provisions in a basket and had made their meal in unusual contentment under the shelter of a group of small sycamores that grew on the western slope of the camp, overlooking the great Somersetshire plain.

Gerda was now fast asleep. Stretched out upon her back, she lay as motionless as the shadows about her, one arm curved beneath her fair head and the other flung upon a bed of moss. Wolf sat with his arms hugging his knees, and his back against a sycamore-trunk.

The weather had been good for the wheat that Summer, and not too scorching to the grass; so that what he looked at now, as he let his eyes wander over that great level expanse towards Glastonbury, was a vast chessboard of small green fields, surrounded by pollarded elms of a yet darker colour, and interspersed by squares of yellow stubble.