All that night Abner heard Gladys crying softly and Mary moving about in the room beneath him. In the small hours she knocked at his door and begged him to take Morgan into his bed. Gladys was so restless that the child could not get to sleep. They spoke together with the oak door between them, and a moment later, having knocked again, she thrust a small, red-eyed figure into the room. Abner picked him up and carried him into bed. The child nestled close to him, like a small, warm-blooded animal. Abner wrapped him up in his arms, protectively, as though, by steadying his muscles, he could compel him to settle down to sleep. Morgan’s fingers lay gently on his forearm, soft and listless. He was so quiet that Abner thought he had fallen asleep already. In this he was mistaken. The change of rooms and the adventure of finding a new bedfellow had completely wakened him, and when he had lain dead still for a little while, Morgan’s fingers began to stroke Abner’s arm. Then he fidgeted and spoke in a reverent whisper:

‘Abner, are you awake?’

‘Ay, what is it?’

‘Why is your arm all hairy, Abner?’

‘Why? Because I’m grown up.’

‘Mam’s isn’t,’ said Morgan, after a thoughtful pause, and then: ‘I like being here.’

‘Then don’t you go asking questions or I’ll put you out again,’ said Abner.

After this the child was quiet. He lay there burning in Abner’s arms. Falling asleep, his limbs relaxed, and then, suddenly clutching at consciousness, twitched violently. These movements were like those of a very young animal, feeble and frightened, and Abner, feeling them, gathered the child more closely in his arms, until he moved no longer save with the gentle breathing of a sweet sleep.

Abner had never slept with a child before. It gave him a queer, almost physical sensation of comfort in addition to the protective emotions which Morgan’s helplessness aroused. He had never thought seriously what it would be like to have a child of his own, and even now he did not explain his feelings in that way. He pictured himself, for a moment, in the position of father to a child of Susie Hind’s, and the prospect did not move him. The only way in which he could explain this curious enthralling tenderness was by the fact that Morgan was really part of Mary, that the child had come to him straight from the warmth of her arms, carrying with him an impalpable essence of herself. He wondered vaguely what he would have felt like if the child had been not only Mary’s but his as well, and in the midst of these tender and dangerous reflections he fell asleep himself.

Next morning, before returning to work, he left a message with the doctor at Lesswardine, asking him to call at Wolfpits. All through the day he was restless and unhappy, feeling that his proper place was at Wolfpits lending Mary a hand, supporting her anxieties. He consoled himself with the knowledge that Mrs Mamble was used to domestic troubles and would probably be of more use to Mary than himself, even apart from the fact that their finances would not easily stand the strain of the lost time. He only wondered, all the time, what the doctor’s report would be, and whether their wild night-journey might have added to the child’s injury. He did not mention anything of what had happened to his mates, and the day was therefore long and anxious.

It was after dinner-time when the doctor reached Wolfpits. Escorted by Mrs Mamble, he soon got to business and took down the injured limb, complimenting the Brampton Bryan surgeon on the way in which he had done his job. The dislocated fragments, he said, had been skilfully opposed, and the leg now lay in a good position. Gladys was young, a child’s tissues were full of vitality, and the splint, which he put on again, need not be worn for more than three weeks.

He stayed a little longer than he need have done, for he had finished his round and Mary Malpas was an attractive woman. He was a middle-aged man and not above taking a kind of guarded pleasure in the intimacy with such charming creatures that his profession gave him. He asked her how it had all happened, and Mary told him, without hesitation, of their train journey two nights before, of their difficulty of finding rooms at Redlake, and of all that had led up to the accident. He listened gravely, giving no sign of unusual interest when Abner’s name was mentioned, but when he drove away again he chuckled to himself, being intrigued by this new little sidelight on the frailty of human nature, and taking an interest that was not wholly professional in the idea of this extraordinarily desirable woman finding consolation in the arms of her lodger. For that was how he interpreted the case.

When he got home that evening he told the story to his wife. Little incidents of this kind, which came so often into his professional experience, supplied him with a vicarious sexual stimulus which his marital relations had lacked for some years. Mrs Hendrie, listening, pursed her lips, and smiled. The story was not one for general publication, but she knew that it would be acceptable to the vicar’s wife, who had already taken such a kindly, if profitless, interest in this unfortunate young woman.

In this way the scandal of the Redlake adventure began to be whispered in that most exclusive circle of which the sewing-party at the vicarage was the centre. In this quarter, indeed, Mary had been already judged and damned as a woman who preferred a life of open sin to the privilege of attending to the blameless, physical needs of the Rev. Cyril Malpas. The new intelligence did no more than supply a sorrowful confirmation of what was already suspected. ‘It’s those two sweet children I’m thinking of,’ said the vicar’s wife. ‘Imagine the awful effects of surroundings of that kind in later life!’ The vicar only shook his head. After all, Wolfpits was so very nearly in his neighbour’s parish as to make him scarcely responsible.

It came as a great relief to Abner to find that Gladys was none the worse for her journey in his arms. In the morning they pulled round the long kitchen settle into the sun, and in the evening he carried this out of doors so that the child might enjoy the mellow light with the others. She took a few days to get over the original shock of the accident, but after that she settled down into a placid convalescence, fully aware of her importance and treating, not only Mary and Mrs Mamble, but Abner and Mick Connor, as her slaves. Morgan was vaguely jealous of the attention that they paid her.

‘But I slep’ with Abner,’ he said, ‘and Gladys an’t, has her, mam?’

Mary smiled at him. Now that she knew that Gladys’s injury was not so severe as they had imagined she could afford to smile, sitting there in the summer evening with her friends about her. It was so quiet at Wolfpits. Not even the birds were singing. She sat there and heard the trout rising and plopping in the pool beneath the bridge, a hundred yards away, and then the murmurous wings of a humming-bird-hawk moth, hovering in a nebula of bronze, swooping to plunge its curled trumpet into the cups of flowers. Then beetles droned above them and bats zig-zagged with rapid wings. She told Abner that it was time for him to take the settle into the house. While he did so she held Gladys in her lap and watched the man’s big shoulders as he moved almost without effort under the weight of the settle. It reminded her of another memory of him that she knew she would never forget: a picture of trailing mists and loneliness, and a man walking before her with a child in his arms.

In this state of happiness and innocence neither of them suspected any mischief of tongues. It is true that Abner had found the presence of Badger at the Pentre on the night of the fair a little sinister at first, but the fact that they had chosen to descend into the Wolfpits valley at the level of the sea-crows’ pool and Williams’s farm was the purest accident, and Mary, who only knew the keeper by name, and had never seen him outside a court of law, thought nothing of it, while Mr Williams of the Pentre never entered into their calculations as a source of evil.But Williams, in spite of his ready kindness in driving them back to Wolfpits with his tired horse, had chuckled to find in this incident a chance of annoying his old enemy, Mrs Malpas of the Buffalo. In all things he was a gross and childish man, whose plan of life embraced only two classes of acquaintance, enemies and friends, and he spent the greater part of his time in scheming to annoy the former and overwhelm the latter with the most naÏve of kindnesses. As for Mrs Malpas, not even pity for her in the affair of George could induce him to forget his quarrel over the hogshead of cider. He knew very well that her weak spot was her own claim to an unassailable chapel morality, and having already enjoyed the pleasure of scoring her off by sending her only son on his first stage to Shrewsbury as a felon, he could not now resist the satisfaction of telling her that her daughter-in-law had been away with the lodger while George was in Salop jail.

Next week, at Ludlow market, he entertained the farmers’ ordinary with the story, and in the evening, having done a good day’s business and drunk enough to make him fear no man, he drove home, chuckling to himself, by way of Chapel Green, pulling up at the Buffalo for a final drink. It was the first time that he had visited the inn since that unfortunate quarrel. The cloggers who had gone away in the previous winter had found lodgings in a village farther westward on their return in the spring, and the Buffalo had never emerged from the silence in which they had left it. Mrs Malpas seemed surprised that any one should call so late at night. The bar was empty, and she had to light the swinging oil lamp for him, standing on a chair. Williams himself found a match and lit it for her out of sheer fuddled kindness. It struck her that he was too kind by half. He drank his whisky standing in the middle of the taproom, smacking it on his tongue.

‘You didn’t go to Bron Fair, ma’am?’ he said.

‘No,’ Mrs Malpas replied. ‘Nor have I these many years.’

‘There’s pretty things to be seen there,’ said Williams, with a grin. She made no reply, and he advanced obliquely from another angle.‘How’s your son getting on?’

‘But for the shame that we all bear, Mr Williams, he’s out of harm’s way.’

‘Yes, it’s a good Christian prison, I’m told,’ said he, laughing. ‘Chaplains and all! How’s his wife, eh?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Mrs Malpas shortly. ‘And I don’t want to know.’

‘Smart looking young woman!’ Williams leered.

‘I know nothing about her, Mr Williams.’

‘Then I’ll tell you something, ma’am. She’s been off on the spree, childer an’ all, to Bron Fair. Slept the night at the Harley Arms, Redlake, with that lodger chap. What do you think of that?’

Mrs Malpas blenched. ‘That’s your story, Mr Williams, but there’s no need to believe you, thanks be!’

‘But seeing’s believing, ma’am,’ said Williams heavily. ‘And I seen. What is it I owe you now?’

She gasped: ‘Sixpence,’ and took the money. Williams gave her a cheery good-night. He wondered at the way in which she had taken his scandal. ‘A proper hard old case, an’ no mistake!’ he thought. Mrs Malpas, forgetful of economy, left the light burning and went straight in to her husband. In moments of stress, even though she despised him and knew that he hardly understood her, she would use him as a dummy on which to vent her feelings.

‘Dad, dad!’ she cried. ‘That was Mr Williams of the Pentre.’

‘Ay, mother . . . good land, good land! Williams. . . . Ay.’

‘He has a tale of our George’s wife. She’s going on with that Fellows as lodges with them, the one that brought trouble on George. They was caught the two on them, at the Harley Arms, Redlake. You know . . .’

The old man, who was now awake, mumbled something about that being in the nature of things when a young woman was left too long to herself. She picked up the word furiously.

‘Nature!’ she cried. ‘It’s the nature of a brute beast, not the nature of a Christian woman! It’s the bad blood in her!’He let her rave on in the dark. It was late, and now unlikely that any one else would call in at the bar. His head nodded, while she went on fuming, half to him and half to herself. She persuaded herself that her morality had been offended, though it was really the spiteful satisfaction of Williams rather than his news that had wounded her, for she could not think any worse of Abner and Mary than she did already. When the heat of her irritation against the farmer subsided, its place was taken by another and more subtle flame. She realised that she had found something to explain her former unreasonable hatred. Williams, in trying to shame her, had put a new weapon into her hands, one with which she might positively injure Abner and Mary together in George’s eyes. It had been the hardest part of her dealings with him at the time of the trial to see the way in which his loyalty to Mary, however little that might mean, returned. Now that her chance had come, George couldn’t keep up this sentimental pretence of a belief in Mary’s goodness any longer. Williams had justified her at last.

She helped the old man up to bed, blew out his candle, and left him in the dark. Then she went downstairs, carried the lamp from the bar into the parlour, took out a sheet of lined paper, and a penholder carved out of olive wood from the garden of Gethsemane, and—began a letter to George. She wrote without haste, in the firm pointed characters that she had learnt as a young girl, carefully, methodically, with a perfect and cold precision. From first to last not the least quaver of indecision stayed her pen; but when she held the paper to the light to read what she had written, her hands trembled and the words ran like fire across her brain.

‘My dear Son,’—she had written, ‘I hope this finds you in perfect health as it leaves me, thank God, and your father. I am sorry to say that I have sad news to tell you which, I am afraid, is all too true. Your wife and the young man Fellows have been away together, living in sin at the Harley Arms, Redlake. It was madness of you, as I tried to tell you before, but you would not listen to your mother, to have trusted them, but you only laughed me to scorn. Now it is an open scandal and hard for your poor father to bear. You can do nothing to mend it where you are, but be patient, dear George, and remember the word of Hebrews xii. 6: “Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth.” I wish I had not to write this, George, but I have always told you that she was a light and wicked woman. Still it is just as well, and God moves in a mysterious way, for when you come back you can take the children away from her, though do not think that you will have the Buffalo, even if God should take your dear father, for the justices would never give it to one who had been in jail, even for no fault of their own. In this way you are saved from temptation. This is the Lord’s doing, dear George, and it is marvellous in our eyes. Why did you not send for me last month, my son? I will tell you more, please God, when we meet, I remain, with fond kisses,

Your loving mother,
‘Arabella Malpas.’

She sighed, sealed the envelope, and addressed it to:—

‘George Malpas,
‘No. 157. County Jail,
‘Shrewsbury.’

Then she folded her spectacles, blew out the light, and went upstairs in the dark to the room where her husband was already snoring. She crept into bed beside him and soon fell asleep in the blessed consciousness of innocence.

Williams, blabbing to old Mrs Malpas in the childish hope of irritating her, was not the only person who found an interest in spreading the story. Badger, pulled into the mist out of the stink of his preservatives and walking sullenly up the slope toward the sea-crows’ pool, had slowly realised that here was an opportunity of discrediting Abner in the eyes of Susie Hind once and for all. Although the lovers’ meetings had of late been fewer and secret, while Susie, reminded from time to time of the keeper’s jealousy, had been clever enough to laugh him off and to make him feel ridiculous, Badger had not forgotten his suspicions. It was true that he never now saw Abner at the Pound House, and never heard his name mentioned outside the tirades of Mr Hind, who was still anxious for his licence, but the rearing of his young pheasants was now keeping Badger busy, and since he had no time to waste in watching, he could never be quite sure that Abner was not profiting by his forced neglect. Sometimes he would threaten Susie as he had done before, pretending that he knew more than he did; but experience had taught her how to deal with this crude creature; she treated his violence as though it amused her, and he always ended by accepting what she said with certain dark reservations that only troubled him beneath the threshold of consciousness, and set him strangely wondering at night.

In the middle of one of these doubting moods Williams had come knocking at his door with Abner beside him, asking for his help in the search for Mary, and next day he and his neighbour had talked together, Williams delighted as a child in his discovery of such frailty in old Mrs Malpas’s daughter-in-law. Badger cared nothing one way or the other for Mary’s chastity, he had no particular grudge against Mrs Malpas or her son, but he quickly saw that in Williams’s discovery he had hit on a rare touchstone for Susie’s feelings toward Abner. He saw that he must make use of it before the tale became common talk, so he cornered Susie at the first opportunity that he found, and told her, as bluntly as was his custom, what had happened.

‘He’s brazen-faced enough, that chap Fellows,’ he said, ‘seeing that he told Mr Williams right out that he and George Malpas’s wife had slept at the Harley Arms, over Redlake way. Took the two children with ’em and all! That was the rum part of it!’

While he spoke he watched Susie with his small keen eyes, sharpened by the habit of observing wild game, waiting for her face to betray to him exactly what she felt toward Abner. But it was not for nothing that Susie had learnt the art of being all things to all men. Badger’s eyes were a little too eager, and she was quick to see it.‘Why do you want to tell me this, Mr Badger?’ she said slowly.

‘He’s an old friend of yours. You don’t put me off as easy as that!’

‘Then you might have saved yourself the trouble,’ she said, turning her back on him. ‘If you’ve any other dirty stories to tell, I’ll be obliged if you’ll keep them to yourself.’

He flushed darkly, so that she felt she was overdoing it. She came back to him and stood talking of other things, her hand on the table within an inch of his own.

‘I hope you didn’t take any offence,’ she said softly. ‘Only I don’t like to hear my name coupled with a chap of that kind.’

Badger swallowed his liquor with satisfaction. It seemed to him that he had artfully secured his point. He looked Susie up and down, appraising her, lazily satisfied. She had gained a new value in his eyes. He held her in talk, and she loitered by his table, standing on one leg. In taking away his glass she even touched his hand. They were alone in the bar. He caught her and kissed her. Protesting, as a matter of form, she smiled. In her heart she hated him like poison. Her mind was aflame with vague jealousies, for any fool could see that Abner was worth two of this man.

That night she heard the gang from the pipe-track discussing the accident at Bron, winking at each other over the way in which the story had come out. They laughed without condemning. To them it seemed no more than a good joke. When her father’s back was turned the Gunner began to pull her leg about it; but she laughed back at him, giving him coarseness for coarseness, and went on wiping her glasses, humming to herself the refrain of a pantomime tune. She heard herself singing. Her voice sounded toneless and unreal. When she went to bed she could not sleep for fretting. Abner had not been near her for more than a week, and she did not dare to take the risk of sending him a message at his work. She knew that she wanted him. She was not going to lose him without a fight.Next afternoon she was free, and knowing that Abner would be safely at work, she dressed herself elaborately in her best clothes and a pair of new shoes and set off boldly for Wolfpits. Her hands trembled and her frock was drenched with perspiration as she dressed.

‘Where are you off to, got up like that?’ her father called after her.

‘Can’t I dress as I like, dad?’ she said, with a toss of her head.

‘There’s tempest about. You’ll get soaked to the skin!’ he shouted.

She felt as if she were soaked to the skin already. The long spell of rainless weather had reached its climax, and the delaine frock that she had chosen had been cut for elegance rather than for comfort. The sun went in, leaving a white and heavy sky. The leaves of elm and chestnut drooped in the heat as with the weight of their own dust. Her new shoes were too small for her, and by the time that she had toiled up to the bridge over the Folly, she wished that she had not come. A yaffle mocked her from the edge of the wood. Swallows were hawking low down over the dust of the road. An awful, oppressive silence weighed on the land. She hesitated, then turned painfully up the Wolfpits avenue, but when she had almost decided to turn back, the thunder broke above her and big drops spattered the dust. The thought of the new tulle in her hat made her run for shelter. The trees of the avenue gave a long sigh and the rain swished down in torrents. Round the corner she saw Mrs Mamble running about, like a woman possessed, after the washing that she had spread on the bushes to dry.

‘Slip into the porch, miss,’ she cried, catching sight of Susie, ‘or you’ll be drownded.’ Then she called to Mary, who was ironing in the kitchen: ‘There’s a young lady got caught in the storm, Mrs Malpas!’

‘Please come inside and wait till it’s over,’ Mary cried, glancing through the window.

Susie entered. ‘Take a seat,’ Mary said, and went on with her ironing. One side of her face was flushed with the heat of the iron that she had tested by holding it to her cheek. It made her look as if she were angry or embarrassed. The kitchen was full of the sweet, scorched smell of linen. Susie, sitting nervously on the edge of the seat to which she had been shown, felt that the falseness of her position must be made clear. She was out to fight, and not without courage.

‘My name is Hind . . . Susan Hind,’ she said. ‘From the Pound House, you know.’

Mary stopped ironing and looked at her. She began to wish that she had not turned herself out so elegantly. She felt that she must look like a street-woman.

‘Yes . . . I thought I knew you,’ Mary said.

‘I came over to speak to you.’ Susie hesitated: ‘About Mr Fellows . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘There’s a tale going round . . .’ She faltered. She wished that she were not sitting on the edge of the chair, that Mary were not taller than herself. There was something unfair and consciously superior in the woman’s plain white apron. More than this, she had the subtle, inexplicable advantage of being a married woman with children . . . even if her husband had deserted her. Mary put down her iron on its stand and looked her full in the eyes. Now her cheeks were equally flushed. Susie wished that she would speak, even if she were only to repeat her provocative ‘Yes?’ She took fright suddenly, stood up, and plunged.

‘It’s not fair!’ she cried. ‘You know it’s not fair! You, a married woman, that have had your life and a couple of children! But as soon as your husband’s well out of sight you must go running after another man. Take his money—that’s one thing! But take him—that’s another! I suppose you’re the kind that can’t make yourself happy unless you’re making some man soft on you . . . so they can hang round you and you play the lady on them! Don’t you imagine I don’t know the dog’s life you give George! And now you’ve got hold of your lodger—lodger, I says!—and turned him crazy. Call yourself a lady! Doesn’t every one know what your father was? We all know about that. George himself told me. And I can tell you what you are, straight. You’re nothing better than a whore on the streets if the truth was known.’

Mary trembled. ‘Don’t shout so! Don’t shout so!’ she said. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘What I mean?’ cried Susie hysterically. ‘What I mean? Why, going about the country in strange places and laying about with single men. That’s what I mean. Call yourself a married woman . . .’

‘You’re wrong . . . you’re quite wrong!’

‘Am I wrong then? I know whose word I’d sooner take: Mr Williams’s and Mr Badger’s or yourn! I know that was the first time it came out, but that makes no difference to what every one in the district has known for a fact these months. But I’ll tell you one thing—and don’t you forget it!—you’re not going to take Abner off me. Not if I kill him first. And I’m not talking wild, understand. I mean it. If I have to shame you to your face I’m not going to let him go. Shame . . .’ she laughed. ‘That’s a fine word to use for the likes of you!’

She gave a gasp for breath, then, with a flash of hopeless hatred, as though she were searching the room for something that her violence might appropriately destroy, she went out blindly into the rain.

Mary stood rigidly at her ironing-table. A flash of lightning ripped the sky in front of her window, nearly blinding her, and her lips uttered a cry. Mrs Mamble ran in with her skirt thrown over her head, for she was frightened of thunder.

‘My!’ she cried from under the skirt. ‘My, what a downpour!’ She looked out timidly. ‘Well, I never! She’s gone!’

‘Yes,’ said Mary, with a helpless laugh. ‘She’s gone!’

‘Gone? Why, the girl must be mad!’

Again Mary laughed at the wide astonishment in Mrs Mamble’s eyes. Another flash followed and the old woman wrapped up her head again, waiting for the thunder. It came with a crash, right overhead, and the house shook. Mary suddenly remembered the children, who were playing in the parlour.

‘Do go and see to them, Mrs Mamble,’ she said. ‘There’s a dear.’She herself could not move. She went on folding her linen. It seemed as if she must find some mechanical task for her hands to do. In a moment Mrs Mamble returned to say that the children were not in the least frightened. She kept dodging in and out of the house all afternoon for fear of the storm returning and catching her unawares, telling of the damage that the rain might have done to the hay lying out in the meadows or to the standing corn.

‘But there’s no denying that it’s wanted,’ she said inconsequently.

By the time that Abner left work that evening the storm had rolled away, rumbling over the treetops of Bringewood Chase. All day he had worked under the heavy sky, breathing an air that was dead and choked with dust. Now the vault was clear and brilliant as that of an evening in spring. The smell of dust rose from the road, blackbirds were singing, and from the pale, steaming hayfields waves of sweetness drifted across his path. His steps were light and his heart happy.

Mary received him as usual and gave him his tea. He laughed with her over the violence of the storm and asked her gaily if the doctor had been to take the splint off Gladys’s leg.

‘We must put by a shillin’ or two for that,’ he said. For the moment he was so full of his own content that he had scarcely noticed her preoccupation; but when he mentioned money she made a quick, instinctive movement, as though she wanted to speak and to refuse it. Little by little he began to realise that she was trying to avoid him and sometimes leaving his questions unanswered.

‘What’s up with you, missus?’ he said.

‘Nothing,’ she replied. ‘Nothing at all that I know of.’

But her denial did not convince him. All the evening he tried to guess what could have upset her, but she evaded him, pretending that she was her normal self. He knew better. Even when she spoke to the children or to Mrs Mamble, who came in to talk about the havoc of the storm and to give them the news that a sheep had been struck by lightning on Williams’s farm, Mary was listless and dull.Abner used her gently. He knew that women must have their moods, and that a man needed to be patient with them if he would be happy; but day after day now passed without any change in her attitude. Since the discovery of his own passion that he had made by the sea-crows’ pool, it had been hard enough as it was for him to live with her on ordinary terms; but now, even though he humoured her, she was distant with him.

He tried to make her explain herself. She only shook her head. It seemed, indeed, as if a single day had thrown them back into all the awkwardness of his early life at Wolfpits, and that she had suddenly taken it into her head to upset the convention under which they had agreed to live. Most of all, she avoided him whenever he spoke of money, and when he brought her his wages at the end of the week she left them lying on the table as though touching them would have burned her fingers. If he had not loved the woman, and her children too, he would have broken away in accordance with his nature. As it was, he hung on, sore and bewildered, wondering what new coldness she could inflict upon him.

Another shock awaited her. One day, when Abner was away at work, the postman bicycled up to Wolfpits and handed her a letter. This was so rare an event at Wolfpits that the man waited, as country postmen, who also act as interpreters, often do, to hear its contents.

‘You’ll see by the postmark it’s come from Shrewsbury,’ he said.

‘Yes, so I see,’ she replied, thrusting it into the pocket of her apron.

She had already recognised George’s freehand writing. He went away, but she kept the letter in her pocket unopened. She dared not open it; and when at last she did so, the words sent a chill over all her body.

‘My dear Wife,’—she read, shivering—‘Although I may be doing time I’m not yet dead that I know of. They say that love is blind, but don’t you go imagining that other people haven’t got eyes.

‘Your loving husband,
‘George.’

She was seized with a pain that had scarcely abated when Abner came home at night. She could not bring herself to speak to him. She desired, passionately, to show him the letter, but shame would not let her do so. He, in his turn, was sick of the wretchedness of their present relation, and when the children had been put to bed, he told her so in words that he had chosen for their roughness. She stared at him from the other side of the supper table with grief and resentment in her eyes.

‘If it’s as bad as that, what makes you stay here?’ she said slowly.

‘I like that!’ he replied. ‘You know as well as I do.’

She took fright at this, for she wasn’t sure of his meaning, though she knew in her heart what she wanted him to mean. She was afraid that he would guess at her unspoken admission.

‘I don’t keep you here,’ she said.

He got up and walked the room. A hay-moth hurled itself against the shade of the lamp with a sharp ringing sound and fell crippled on the tablecloth.

‘It’s hurt,’ she cried. ‘Kill it!’

Abner crushed the insect with his thumb and threw it in the fireplace. The coppery bloom came off on his fingers. For a moment she was hypnotised watching him. Then she recovered her senses.

‘I don’t keep you. There’s no need for you to stay in every night,’ she said.

‘No. There bain’t. I’m damned if there be!’ he replied.

He picked up his cap and walked out of the room. She nearly ran after him to thrust George’s letter into his hand. But she was too late. ‘So much the better,’ she thought. She felt that she had been saved from some calamity.

He set off, walking furiously through the mellow evening, trying to cool his blood with violent exertion as instinctively as an animal eats grass. By nightfall he had reached the remote valley, nine miles away in folds of the Forest of Clun, whither his friends the cloggers had returned in the spring. He found their canvas pitched in a coomb under high sheepwalks, and Wigan Joe made him as welcome as ever. They sat out in the soft, moonless night, talking and drinking beer. It was like old times for Abner to hear Joe reeling off stories one after another in his flat Lancashire dialect. He lolled there listening till the company grew drowsy. There was no question of his returning to Wolfpits that night, for the sky drooped like a pall of velvet on the earth and he could never have found his way. He turned in with the others on a pile of dried bracken, waking at dawn to set off again toward Chapel Green.

For a few hours he had shed his restlessness, but when he reached Wolfpits in the evening the sense of restraint descended on him again. He felt that Mary was watching him, wondering where he had been. Her eyes were tragic, and, as he thought, reproachful.

This only irritated him. He couldn’t be bothered with her moods. When, speaking to Mrs Mamble, he happened to mention that he had walked over in the evening to the sloggers’ workings, she looked at him with such a searching suspicion that he could not contain himself.

‘What’s up with you?’ he said. ‘Do you think I’m codding you?’

She looked away without answering.

‘There’s no need to believe me if you don’t want to,’ he said.

And what the hell did it matter to her where he went or what he did? If he were to leave her to herself for a bit perhaps she’d begin to realise that he was useful, and that it wouldn’t pay her to treat him like dirt. It was time she had a lesson!

He spent the next evening with Mick Connor in a pub at Lesswardine, mixing his drinks, standing treat recklessly. He had to borrow six shillings from Mick to pay his score. It pleased him to think how Mary would stare at his money next Saturday when she found it six bob short . . . she, who was too proud to pick it up when he gave it her!

At the yellow turnpike house outside Lesswardine their paths diverged; and this was unfortunate, for it was easier to walk arm in arm. Mick left him; but as soon as he found himself alone the vision of Mary returned to him: Mary, as he had seen her and desired her, sitting pale on the border of the pool a fortnight ago. In his perverse and drunken mind he hated her. It seemed to him that she had been making a fool of him, alternately alluring and rejecting.

He walked along, sweating violently, in the direction of Mainstone, wishing to God he’d never known the damned woman. Women . . . and yet a lusty man of his age couldn’t live without women! It was against nature to live without women, and a man was a fool if he did so. He went hot and cold, thrilled with voluptuous sensations. He laughed at himself, and staggered up to a gate at the side of the road to light his pipe. He broke three matches and then discovered that they were damp and would not strike. He remembered indefinitely that Mick had upset a pint of beer into his pocket. He cursed the matches and Mick together.

A light breeze moved above him, and as in the distance he heard a sound like that of a gentle shower falling on leaves in June: a sound that meant something to his memory. He became suddenly aware that he was standing at that moment on the outskirts of Mainstone village, immediately beneath a big poplar tree. A dozen times he had stood there in the shadow waiting for the light to go out in the windows of the Pound House, for the steps of Bastard to pass him, for the moment when he might safely steal across to Susie’s door.

His pulse quickened. Some hidden instinct must have made him stop there. No light could be seen, but there, in the darkness, was a woman whom he could have for the asking. He pulled himself together, and a moment later was standing by the outhouse door. He threw a clod at her window-pane. She had better not try putting him off to-night! If he had to climb in at her window she must come to him. He fretted with impatience.

But he had not long to wait. In a few minutes she had opened the back door. He heard the door scrape, but it was so dark that he could not see her. He put out his hands, groping in the darkness, and found her, warm and breathing.

‘I thought you were never coming again,’ she whispered.

He took her in his arms and clothed her in kisses. She clung to him, breathing softly, while his kisses enveloped her. His misery left him, vanished miraculously in the darkness. In the black confusion of his thoughts it seemed to him as if he were kissing Mary Malpas.