She moved away to persuade the winner of the match and his rustic admirers to gather about another wooden table, leaving the “gentry” to their own devices.

Then it was that Wolf’s mind completely recovered from its sense of unreality and from its hallucinations about Lenty Pond. From where he lay in a creaky straw-plaited chair between Darnley and Jason, he could take in at his leisure the whole characteristic West Country scene. There was a relaxed jocularity about the men’s voices, as they rose in that shadowy garden, between the tall privet-hedge and the sloping thatched roof, that seemed to contain within it all the rich apple-juices that were ripening in the orchards around them, all the cool sap of the mangelwurzel plants in the neighbouring fields, the good white heart of billions of ears of plump wheat-sheaves, awaiting their threshing-day in all the granaries between Parret and Stour!