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 "Here you are! So early!" she cried. "I didn't expect you. The dinner isn't ready yet. Well?"

"C 3," he replied. "It's all right."

"I knew it would be," she cried, seizing his arm and hugging it to her. They went in to the cottage to finish cooking the evening meal. And immediately one of the farm girls came running up to see what it was.

"Oh, C 3—so you're all right, Mr Somers. Glad, I'm glad."

Harriet never forgot the straight, intent bee-line for home which he was making when she peeped out of that little window unaware.

So, another respite. They were not going to touch him. They knew he would be a firebrand in their army, a dangerous man to put with any group of men. They would leave him alone. C 3.

He had almost entirely left off writing now, and spent most of his days working on the farm. Again the neighbours were jealous.

"Buryan gets his labour cheap. He'd never have got his hay in but for Mr Somers," they said. And that was another reason for wishing to remove Richard Lovat. Work went like steam when he was on Trendrinnan farm, and he was too thick with the Buryans. Much too thick. And John Thomas Buryan rather bragged of Mr Somers at market, and how he, Richard Lovat, wasn't afraid of any of them, etc., etc.—that he wasn't going to serve anybody, etc—and that nobody could make him—etc., etc.

But Richard drifted away this summer, on to the land, into the weather, into Cornwall. He worked out of doors all the time—he ceased to care inwardly—he began to drift away from himself. He was very thick with John Thomas, and nearly always at the farm. Harriet was a great deal alone. And he seemed to be drifting away, drifting back to the common people, becoming a working man, of the lower classes. It had its charm for Harriet, this aspect of him—careless, rather reckless, in old clothes and an old battered hat. He kept his sharp wits, but his spirit became careless, lost its concentration.

"I declare!" said John Thomas, as Somers appeared in the cornfield, "you look more like one of us every day." And he looked with a bright Cornish eye at Somers' care-