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was a clayey white upon which the delicate touches of make-up showed hard-edged and strange, like paint on the face of a grotesque doll. She was clutching at Myfanwy’s arm. Her lips parted stiffly, writhingly, but whether she spoke or not Jeanie could not tell. She saw Myfanwy with a crude, cruel gesture shake off that clinging hand and pass on quickly up the lane. Agnes looked wildly round, and at the same time Jeanie, taking up an old horseshoe that lay among the hay on the floor, broke the glass in the window. Smashing the jagged edges away, she leant cautiously out and cried:
    â€œAgnes! Agnes!”
    Agnes looked up at her. Jeanie had never in her life seen a look so sick, so despairing on a woman’s face. Agnes’s eyes seemed scarcely to recognise Jeanie, but glanced up and then wandered round her. She tried to speak, and could not.
    â€œAll right, Agnes! I’ll come down!”
    â€œOh, what is it?” cried Sarah at her back, in a voice panicky with fright. “Jeanie! What is it?”
    Agnes put out a vague hand as if to feel the air, and then, with a queer, limp motion as though she were indeed the doll her make-up made her look, let her head drop forward, her shoulders, her waist, her knees, and soundlessly fell, and lay face downwards in her plum-coloured gown in the mud of the lane.

Chapter Three
DEATH IN THE ORCHARD
    Slithering down the loft-ladder, running out into the sunlight, stumbling along the rutty lane, Jeanie had a dreadful prevision of herself lifting Mrs. Molyneux from the mud and seeing her face clayey and dead, mud-streaked, with half-opened eyes and blood oozing through and darkening the cloth of her gown. One could be a long time about one’s dying, shot in a part not vital. And here, so soon after the shot, lay Agnes still as the dead in the muddy lane.
    Agnes’s face was pale enough, and splashed with mud, but the long fair lashes lay quietly on the cheeks, the lips, so strangely out of tone with the rosy cosmetic upon them, were quietly half parted. Briskly chafing the cold hands, Jeanie heard a squeaky voice utter uncertainly:
    â€œYou ought to undo her stays.”
    It was Sarah, almost as white in the face as Agnes herself.
    â€œI don’t think she wears any,” said Jeanie helplessly, “but you could go and get some water from the pump in the yard. There’s bound to be a pail or something.”
    However, almost as soon as Sarah had sped away, Agnes sighed and moved. Her eyes opened slowly. Her lips looked dry and cracked. She looked too tired, too sick, having made the effort to lift her eyelids, to move another muscle. But after a moment memory came back into her blank eyes. Her face contorted. A restless movement passed over her body. She gasped:
    â€œJeanie! Jeanie!”
    â€œWhat is it, Agnes?”
    â€œRobert’s dead, Jeanie. Somebody shot him. Robert’s dead , Jeanie. I saw him. Oh, Jeanie, I feel so sick ! I feel so awful!”
    Kneeling in the wet lane, supported against Jeanie’s shoulder, she fell to trembling violently, like a frightened animal or a patient in a fever.
    â€œWhere is he?” asked Jeanie. “Agnes, do you know what you’re saying?”
    â€œYes. In the orchard. Oh God! Oh God! Jeanie! Oh, Jeanie!”
    She struggled with Jeanie’s help to her feet. Standing, wildly dishevelled, covered in mud, she pushed her hair away from her eyes, she moaned distractedly:
    â€œOh, look at my dress! Oh, Jeanie!”
    Jeanie, supporting her, looked towards the yard for Sarah, and saw her coming slowly and carefully along carrying an enamel basin full of water between her hands.
    â€œOh ducky, you have been a long time!”
    â€œI couldn’t find a bucket! I had to get the chickens’ basin from the orchard!” explained Sarah, whose face looked, poor child, whiter and clammier even than Agnes’s own.
    â€œWell, we don’t need it now. Will you take your aunt up