When Mr Prosser returned from Craven Arms next evening he was in a bad temper. At the Railway Hotel on the night before he had fallen in with a number of cattle dealers from North Bromwich and Manchester. He had drunk more than he could stand, and had sat up playing cards in the commercial room till three o’clock in the morning, losing the price of a bullock in the process. Marion, who met him at Llandwlas station, told him that the Devon cow had died in the night.

‘Died?’ said he, ‘what do you mean “died”? She was all right yesterday.’

‘Fellows says it was bronchitis. It was awful to see her breathing.’

‘Bronchitis! They don’t die that quick with bronchitis. What the hell does Fellows know about it?’

‘He couldn’t have done more than he did,’ she replied. ‘He sat up with her till she went.’

‘I’ve never known such an unlucky year,’ he grumbled. ‘Hayes’s wife says that he won’t be out of hospital for another month or more. Fellows means well enough, but he’s not like an experienced cowman.’ He sat broodily in the trap for a few moments. ‘Why didn’t you send for Harris?’ he asked at length.

‘We did, but Daisy died before he could get up.’

‘I shall advertise for a cowman,’ he said, with a show of determination that gave him a better opinion of himself.

‘Fellows did his best. It wasn’t his fault.’

‘What do you know about it, anyway?’ said Mr Prosser roughly.

Reaching The Dyke in the worst of tempers, he had not even time to give Ethel the kiss for which she stood waiting. He went straight into the dining-room and mixed himself a stiff whisky and water, then, feeling masterful and businesslike, he went straight out into the fields to look for Harris. He found him driving in his team from the plough.‘Did you see Daisy last night?’ he asked.

‘Yes, I see’d her, but not afore she was wellnigh cold.’

‘How did she come to go off sudden like that, eh?’

‘If you want to know what I thinks, Mr Prosser, I’ll tell you. That cow she died of violent neglect. I’ve had my eye on her some days now.’

‘Then why the devil didn’t you say so?’

‘Me and Fellows don’t speak to one another, and you was gone off to the sales.’

‘Why didn’t you tell Miss Marion, then?’

‘It’s no good talking to Miss Marion about he. Her wouldn’t hear a word against Fellows, though he be no more fit to look after cows than rabbits, and I know for why.’ Harris shook his head knowingly.

‘What do you mean by that? Why don’t you speak plain?’

‘And I will speak plain, Mr Prosser, though I don’t know where your eyes have been if you haven’t seed it for yourself. Miss Marion’s soft on that Fellows, and he knows it and takes advantage on it.’

Prosser gave an uneasy laugh. ‘You don’t get me to believe that,’ he said.

‘You can believe it or not, gaffer,’ said Harris. ‘It’s all the same to me. I’m only telling you of what I knows, and what I’ve seen with my own eyes. When Daisy was dying that Fellows was in your own kitchen and the two of them kissing one another, so took up they never saw me coming. And that’s the truth, as I’m standing here!’

Prosser could only stare at him.

‘You ought to have known the name that chap has with women. There’s Mr Hind’s daughter over at the Pound House; there’s George Malpas’s wife, not counting those that was never found out. He’s a proper young bull, that Fellows, and no mistake!’

The farmer left him in a fury. He found Marion laying the supper-table in the dining-room. Ethel was crouched by the fire reading a book of fairy-tales.

‘You go out into the kitchen, Ethel,’ he said. ‘I want to talk to Marion.’‘I’m so comfy here, dad,’ said the child sleepily.

‘Do as you’re bid!’ he shouted, and Ethel, frightened, left the room.

‘You’ve scared her,’ said Marion. ‘She’s not used to being spoken to like that.’

‘No,’ said he, ‘and it ’ld be better for the both of you if you were. Just you put those things down and tell me the truth about Fellows.’

‘What do you mean, father?’ she asked. ‘I’ve told you he did all he could. He sat up with her.’

‘And that’s a damned lie to start with! Sat up with her, did he? Sat up spooning in the kitchen along with you. That’s more like it!’

She blushed, then straightened herself and faced him with her hands clasped before her. He was almost frightened of her burning eyes.

‘Who told you that?’ she said quietly.

‘Never you mind who told me. They that told me saw it with their own eyes. Saw you behaving like a labourer’s girl in a hedge. That’s a fine thing to come to! You deny it if you can!’

‘I’m not going to deny it,’ she said.

‘Then you’ve no shame left in you. Thank God your poor mother hasn’t lived to see it! I never thought to hear a daughter of mine speak like that!’

He waited for her to defend herself; but she stood as though petrified, cold, with a furnace of emotions flaming inside her. He took her by the arm, roughly, and shook her.

‘Don’t dad!’ she whispered.

‘Here, tell me how far it’s gone.’

She wouldn’t answer him.

‘You’d better make a clean breast of it. How long has it been going on? There’s nothing wrong with you, eh? Better tell me straight!’

The implication affronted her modesty, for though she had fearfully imagined physical passion and its admonitions had found their way into her dreams, the least suggestion of crudity shocked her. Her father’s words made her want to cover her face for shame. Her resolution wavered. In a piercing moment of revelation she saw the scene in which she was taking a part: the hard, tasteless room, with its steel engravings of sporting pictures and its horsehair-covered furniture, the coarse cutlery that she had been putting on the table, the metallic ticking bronze clock on the mantelpiece, the worn hearthrug, and, in front of her, the angry, flushed face of her father, the face of a man inflamed by passion and the prejudices of his class. And she saw herself, a farmer’s daughter in a print overall, discovered, shamed, in a gross affair with a labouring man. How many times in the history of the countryside had the same scene been enacted? How many women of her kind had been pestered with the same urgent questions? And still he pressed her.

‘What’s done can’t be mended. Better tell me straight, my girl!’

All her suppressed idealism rose in revolt against him, against her surroundings, against her whole manner of life. She hated her father and utterly despised him.

‘I won’t have you talking to me like that,’ she said. ‘I’m not a child, and you shan’t treat me like one. I’m a woman. I’m nearly thirty. Do you think a woman can go on living this miserable, separated life and settle down into an old maid like Aunt Isabel without feeling anything? No . . . people like you don’t think that a woman should have any feelings. You think as long as you’re well fed and get your glass of whisky at night and all your books kept up to date, you think that’s enough life for a woman, you think that it’s a privilege for her to spend her days looking after you. Do you think a woman never wants a man?’

Prosser gasped. ‘I think you’ve taken leave of your senses, Marion,’ he said.

‘I’ve a life to live as well as you!’ she cried. ‘You call yourself a farmer, but you’ve no more idea of nature . . .’ She could say no more, but threw her hands wide in a gesture of despair.

It slowly dawned on him that she was defending herself. He saw himself shamed among his fellows. There had never been a scandal at The Dyke in his time. He said: ‘Good God! Good God!’ then helped himself to another glass of whisky and took a stiff gulp. ‘Well, I never thought it of you,’ was all he could say. He poured out another tot.

A sudden gust of anger swept over Marion. Scarcely knowing what she did, she picked up the cut-glass whisky decanter and sent it crashing into the fire. The flames roared up the chimney; blue tongues of lighted spirit ran out over the hearthrug.

‘Marion! My God, you’re mad!’ he cried. ‘You’ll set the house afire! What do you think you’re doing?’

He snatched a rug from the sofa and went down on his knees stifling the flame. She burst out into a fit of uncontrollable laughter. He stared at her, frightened. ‘What are you laughing at?’ he cried.

‘I don’t know,’ she said weakly. ‘I felt I must break something. What an awful mess!’ The outburst had sobered her, and more than that the sight of her father’s scared and innocent face.

‘It’s all right now,’ she said. ‘I’ll fetch a cloth from the kitchen.’

He looked so bewildered that she couldn’t help laughing at him.

‘I’m damned if I can make you out,’ he said.

‘Of course you can’t. You’ve not the least idea. . .’

‘Then it’s all right?’ he said solemnly.

The dawning relief in his face was too much for her. She knelt down on the carpet beside him and kissed his head.

‘Oh, dad, you’re too killing!’ she said. ‘Do you think I can’t look after myself?’

‘Well, thank Heaven for that!’ was all he could say.

They talked the matter out more soberly that evening over the embers of the fire when Ethel had been sent off to bed. They were as happy in each other’s company and as tender as lovers who have quarrelled and made it up again. The moment of vision had faded for ever. The room in which they sat had regained its old familiarity in Marion’s eyes, forcing itself to be accepted as her home; Mr Prosser was no longer a coarse, fair-whiskered man with more than a drop of whisky in him, but the father whom she had always known; the sombre life of The Dyke, with its slow, rich comfort, was the life to which she had been born. And she considered what would be the effect on that life of her marrying Abner Fellows, for if her father’s suspicions had been justified there was no doubt but that he would have compelled the lover to make an honest woman of her. No happiness worth the daring lay in that direction. She knew that she could hope for nothing but a continual clashing of the two men’s wills and herself a buffer between them. Her father had a long memory for his hates. There could never be any peace in the house till he died. Rather than submit to such a humiliation she would cut herself free from The Dyke and share Abner’s life. Love in a cottage with a vengeance! But did he love her? She had no real reason to believe it. And did she love him? She could not say. Better, far better, cling to the certainties, whatever they might be.

‘We’ll say no more about it,’ said Mr Prosser. ‘Let bygones be bygones, eh?’

She nodded her head slowly at the fire. A piece of the shattered decanter that had escaped her brush suddenly caught a gleam of light. It meant no more to her now than a flake of the stone-men’s flint of the kind that she and Ethel found on their picnics at Castel Ditches.

‘Of course Fellows must go,’ said Mr Prosser. ‘I reckon I can find another man by the end of the week.’

‘Yes,’ Marion murmured. ‘At the end of the week.’

‘Luckily there’s no scarcity of labour,’ said Mr Prosser happily.

Marion’s thoughts turned idly to Wolfpits. She shut the idea of Wolfpits out of her mind. It was wrong, she thought, that Mary Malpas should ever have come again into her life. It was always wrong to uncover the past. They sat for a long time in silence. She crouched on the floor at her father’s side and his arm was thrown carelessly over her shoulder. His head nodded and he fell asleep, but Marion still stared into the embers, seeing nothing. It was nearly midnight when Mr Prosser woke with a start and rubbed his eyes.

‘I think I must have dropped off,’ he said. ‘Why, look at the clock!’ He kissed her good-night.‘By the way,’ he said, ‘I saw young Fred Maddy over at Craven Arms. He talked about riding over for tea Sunday. He’s doing pretty well, is Fred Maddy, since his father died.’

He stood blinking at her curiously; but she made him no reply.

‘Will you put out the light in the kitchen, dad, and see to the doors?’ she said.

Next morning, when he had listened to Abner’s own version of Daisy’s death and stood for a few moments in contemplation of the carcass, Mr Prosser told him without offering any explanation that he would not be wanted at The Dyke after the end of the week. Abner took it for granted that the loss of the cow explained his dismissal. It was a piece of bad luck, and no more was to be said for it. The blow was a heavy one, for he had felt that his position on the farm was secure and that the fortunes of Wolfpits were safe for the winter. He would have to begin his search for work all over again, and this at a time when the demand for labour was at its lowest. What made him particularly savage was the look of triumph that he now saw on Harris’s face. No doubt the ploughman had managed to put a word in against him with Mr Prosser. Well, a man who had taken such a hammering as Harris got on the night of the harvest home had a right to get his own back, particularly when fortune had given his enemy a trip.

What puzzled Abner more was the strangeness of Marion’s attitude. He did not attach any great importance to her breakdown in the farm kitchen and the tender moment that followed: that was the kind of thing that might happen with any woman: but he did find it rather shabby of her to abandon him as soon as he was down on his luck, for he had always felt that she was his friend and supporter, and knew, indeed, that he had owed his job to her from the beginning. Still, he believed that it was in keeping with human—and even more with feminine nature—to kick a man when he was down. The school in which he had been brought up had left him with few romantic illusions: so, instead of brooding over her defection, he went on steadily with his work until the day of his departure.On the last evening they met, for one moment only. She came into the byre at milking-time and took up her old station in the doorway, watching him as he worked. He looked round and found her standing there: it was too dark for him to see her face. She handed him the pails in silence, and when he had finished and stood wiping his hands on his trousers, she said, almost timidly:

‘This is the last time.’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and I’m sorry to go.’

‘I’m sorry too,’ she said, though she could not be sure that she was speaking the truth. ‘You’ve been a great help to us.’

He gave an uneasy laugh. ‘If that old Daisy hadn’t gone and catched cold,’ he said.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked abruptly.

‘That’s a hard one to answer,’ he said.

‘I wish I could help you.’ She found it difficult to speak without wounding his delicacy. ‘If you’re in want of money at any time . . .’ She felt it was her duty to give him anything she possessed. It was necessary for her own self-esteem that she should not feel under any obligation to him.

‘Money’s no use to me,’ he said, falling back on one of Mick Connor’s characteristic phrases.

‘But if ever you’re in need?’ she persisted. ‘I know that Mrs Malpas and her children are dependent on you.’

It was the second time that she had ever mentioned Mary’s name. She compelled herself to do so now because in this way she could make it quite clear that the incident of the other night was forgotten and that he could not build on it. She wanted to clear herself at any price. Even as she spoke the consciousness of her own motives filled her with shame. She held out her hand.

‘You won’t forget that, will you?’ she said.

‘No, Miss Marion, you’ve been a good friend to me.’ And he took her hand in his.

His unexpected use of the respectful prefix emboldened her and made her feel surer of herself. In a moment the indefiniteness of the situation had gone. They were back on their old footing of servant and mistress. Her heart gave a leap of thankfulness. She felt that she was saved. The man whose rough hand her fingers now touched for a moment was no longer the symbol of an ideal but simply a farm-labourer whom her father had dismissed. She withdrew her own hand hurriedly.

‘I’ll say good-bye, then,’ she said.

‘Good-bye, miss, and thank ’ee,’ said Abner, and touched his cap.

The idea of leaving The Dyke had shocked him; but when he passed down the drive for the last time, with Prosser’s money in his pocket, Abner experienced a sudden feeling of relief. It was probable that hard times were ahead of him, and yet he had never felt so free since the day when he left his father’s house at Halesby. When he got home he told Mary with an affectation of lightness that he had got the sack. Her first impulse was one of fear for their finances, but almost as quickly she found herself thankful that Abner was no longer in touch with Marion Prosser. The world in which she and Marion had been friends was so far behind and spoke to her so poignantly of a lost content that she was glad to be wholly freed from it. She could not disguise the fact that she was jealous of Marion, not only for this but for other reasons. She put on a bold and heartening front.

‘I’ve a nice bit of money in hand,’ she said. ‘That shows how wise we were to go easy.’

Her show of cheerfulness and courage pleased him. ‘I thought it ‘d put you out a bit,’ he said.

‘We ought to be used to uncertainty by this time,’ she replied. ‘I’m glad you won’t have that long walk there and back. It was enough to take the strength out of any man.’

‘It’s a rum thing,’ he said, ‘but I don’t mind it any more than you do, leaving The Dyke.’

‘You must get a job nearer home now,’ she said. ‘You’re quite a stranger.’

‘Ay, I’ll have a look round to-morrow,’ he said.

When the day came he had not the heart to set out in quest of work. Instead of doing so he lounged all morning, and after dinner took the children out for a long walk over the stark, wintry fields. They were wildly excited to go with him, for it was now many months since they had known such a holiday. Mary watched them, smiling as they left Wolfpits. She saw that they were happy, and marvelled at her own happiness. Abner and the children made their way through the silent larchwoods to the top of Castel Ditches and sat there gazing idly down upon the river valleys. About the time when cohorts of starlings wheeled through the sky above the reed-beds of the Barbel where they made their nightly roosting place, the three of them dropped down the slope towards the waterworks. There Abner found a diminished gang still working on the last details of the track. The sidings, the cranes, and the engines were gone, and in place of the trenches on which Abner had worked a year before, he now saw trim walls, culverts, and bridges of stone. A single wooden hut remained standing, and there he found the Gunner rubbing his hands over a bucket of coke. He stared at Abner as though he were a stranger.

‘Well, our Abner,’ he cried, when he recognised him, ‘how goes it? I thought you’d left these parts long ago. What have you been up to?’

‘Farm-labouring, up at The Dyke,’ Abner told him.

‘That’s a poor game,’ said the Gunner, shaking his head.

‘Don’t I know it!’ said Abner. ‘I’ve just finished with it. . . Can’t you give us a job here?’

‘No, my son . . . nor any one else,’ said the Gunner. ‘We’re just clearing up like. I’ve got ten men of the old gang left, but in another week we shall have finished the lot. Don’t you imagine I’m sorry for it either. I’ve had enough of Mainstone to last me for a bit.’

‘Well, I’ve got to get a job somehow,’ said Abner.

‘Then you won’t get it here. This place is dead, my son, and that’s the truth! You’d best get back to dear old Brum. Or Coventry, that’s the place for you. Everybody’s going mad on these here motor-cars the same as they did on bicycles. Coventry’s your ticket!’

He gave the children a red-cheeked apple apiece. Abner bade him good-night and turned homewards.‘Did you hear about our wedding at the Pound House?’ the foreman shouted after him. ‘Whisky? You could have swum in it! Pity old Mick wasn’t about.’

It was dusk when Abner reached Wolfpits.

He began his quest for a new job hopefully, undeterred by the foreman’s warning or the still gloomier prophecies of old man Drew. He knew that work was scarce at that season; but it could not well be scarcer than it had been when he found continued employment at The Dyke. Abner felt that luck would come to him in much the same unexpected way.

His first attempts seemed full of promise. At the time when he had set out canvassing before, he had always been received with a kind of negative pessimism that he learned to consider as the normal attitude toward life of the border farmer. Now, he noticed that the farm-people, and particularly the women, listened to his applications with more interest, remembered his name, asked him questions about himself, and even appeared to regard his person with curiosity. He took this as a good sign; but though he was encouraged his hopes came no nearer to realisation. One after another the local farmers or their wives heard his story, had a good look at him, and turned him down.

The reason for their interest was not far to seek. In spite of Mr Prosser’s anxiety to keep dark the true cause of Abner’s dismissal and the scandal that it implied, Harris, the ploughman, had not been able to resist the temptation of making public his enemy’s discomfiture, and though nobody dared to whisper to the principal actors in the comedy that they knew what had happened, the whole story of Marion Prosser’s infatuation for her father’s cowman went the rounds of the neighbourhood. At Ludlow market it passed for a good tale against Prosser, who was envied for his possessions, and Marion, whose aloofness had made her unpopular.

In the most frequent version of the story Abner had been caught out with Marion in the byre at a time when that astute young woman had arranged for her father to stay the night at Craven Arms for his health’s sake. Marion, it was said, had refused, for the most pressing of reasons, to give her cowman up; but Prosser’s family pride—a well-known quantity—had been so deeply wounded that he had threatened to shoot the fellow on the spot and let his daughter’s name go hang. The men enjoyed the joke against Prosser; the women were agreed that proud creatures such as Marion usually found their own level by some such violent means. The principal question of interest that remained was where Marion would go to hide her shameful condition.

In every stratum of local society from that of Lesswardine Court to that of the newly-married Mrs Badger at the Pentre, the incident was discussed; but nobody in the district heard it with more triumph and satisfaction than old Mrs Malpas of the Buffalo. By this time the whole village was so used to her vilifications of Mary that they were scarcely taken seriously, for village opinion, even when it is censorious in expression, is, as a rule, charitable in deed. Now that she found herself armed with a new enormity to reinforce the old, she set herself steadily to the task of making it impossible for Abner to find work. She determined to drive him out of the district, for in this way she knew that Mary and her children must undergo the suffering that they deserved and that Abner’s devotion had spared them.

With incredible patience she made it her business to interview every farmer within five miles of Lesswardine and to beg him, or failing him his wife, to refuse employment to such a scandalous character. The Wesleyan minister at Chapel Green, who regarded Mrs Malpas as one of the principal pillars of his church, helped her in this, and only the laziness of the vicar of Mainstone prevented his wife from making him a party to the same plan. Abner, in his ignorance, was faced by a deliberate boycott. The men who spoke him fairly, when he asked them for work were prepared to see him and the family that he supported starve before they gave it to him.

For a whole month this heart-breaking business went on. When first Abner began to look for work Mary had greeted him every evening with enquiring eyes, Now she no longer dared ask him what had happened during the day. The monotony of unfulfilled promises told on him. He began to avoid her society and to shrink from that of the children, trying to exhaust his strength with long walks afield and cutting wood for Mrs Mamble and old Drew as well as for their own household. She pitied him with all her heart, but dared not show him pity lest it should tax his courage too heavily. Money was running short. She starved herself in order that he and the children might not lack, and thus found herself dragged into a vicious circle, for her sacrifice lessened her own resistance and made her temper uneven and liable to be irritated by Abner’s moroseness. They did not speak of their troubles, but neither of them could see what the end would be.

Wolfpits, in its utter isolation, was the last place in the district that rumour ever reached. It was five weeks after Abner had left The Dyke when Mrs Mamble heard the cause of Abner’s dismissal and whispered it to Mary. In a normal state she might have borne it, but her exhaustion made her an easy prey to jealousy. One evening Abner found her unusually pale and speechless, and asked her what was the matter with her.

‘I’ve only just heard the truth,’ she said, scarcely controlling her passion.

‘What about?’ he asked innocently.

‘About why you left The Dyke. Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I did tell you. You know as well as I do.’

‘You never said a word about Marion. Not one word!’

‘Who’s been putting that rubbidge into your head?’ said Abner angrily.

‘Rubbish!’ she repeated. ‘You can call it that now! But if you’d left the girl alone we shouldn’t be where we are now, not knowing where to look for a shilling and the children likely to want for bread.’

‘You’ve got a maggot in your head, missus,’ he said. ‘Why I left The Dyke’s got nothing to do with Miss Marion, so don’t you think it.’

‘Oh, I’m tired of you!’ she cried. ‘It’s no use your telling off your lies to me. I’m dead sick of you and your women . . . you and your Susie Hinds and Marion Prossers! Running after loose women with your eyes shut and never a thought for those that keep themselves decent like me. And if there was another caught your eye to-morrow, you’d be up and away after her the same. You’re no better than an animal! Like the rest of men: they’re all the same!’

She stood up to him, trembling with rage. At that moment she was ugly, and rising to the violence of her challenge, he hated her. He lost sight of her weakness. All he saw was her impudent provocation. An answering anger fumed up into his head and carried him away so that he could easily have struck her. He came towards her with his hand lifted.

‘Don’t! Don’t!’ she shrieked in terror.

He dropped his hand and walked straight out of the room. Left alone, she was overborne with shame for what she had done, and cried for her lost dignity. Never in her life had she so abased herself. ‘But he lied to me! He lied to me!’ she told herself. ‘If he hadn’t lied to me it wouldn’t have happened!’ Little by little the turmoil of her thoughts abated and she began to remember his goodness, his patience, all that she owed to him. ‘If he had struck me,’ she thought, ‘I should have deserved it.’ She almost wished that his hand had fallen, for nothing less than a blow could have justified her violence and her base ingratitude. The only thing with which she could comfort herself was a firm determination that she would never offend him again. By nothing but the most complete sacrifice of her feelings could she repay him a thousandth part of what she owed him.

After that day she never uttered one complaint, though the tale of her sufferings increased beyond the bounds of endurance. To their hardships she turned a front of steel, but to Abner himself she was as tender as she dared to be. The consciousness of this discipline sustained her. She was a new woman, worn and anxious but invincibly cheerful; and Abner himself took heart from her courage.

Winter fell upon them. The snow-bound ramparts of the hills came nearer to them, encircling the valley with a clear-cut beauty. The colours of life faded from the land, and every farm was like a fortress of stone, close-barred against the assaults of rain and icy wind. The fields lay cold and dead; the sap sank downward from every frozen branch. There was no colour in all the land but a brilliant mockery of red berries on brier and holly and thorn. ‘There’s a tarrable lot of berry this year,’ said old Drew. ‘I reckon we’m in for a hard winter again.’

And so the remotest possibility of finding work on the farms drifted away from Abner. The few labourers who moved about the fields, the solitary teams at plough, seemed glued to the frozen surface of the land, stirring sadly as in a dream. In spite of the kindness of their neighbours, so delicately shown in the gifts of roots and bundles of wood that old Drew carried home on his bent shoulders, the family at Wolfpits felt the pinch of cold and want. Mary, true to her resolution, uttered no word of complaint, but her face told Abner what she was suffering so plainly that he could not bear to look at her. One night he left her and spent the evening with old Drew in his bedroom, drinking the labourer’s home-made poison till his brain was fuddled and his limbs, for the first time, were warm. Mary heard him stumbling up the stairs at night, but when they met next morning she did not reproach him.

Her little store of money was nearly gone. One day, racking her brains for some new expedient to stave off the inevitable end, she remembered Mrs Malpas’s visit and the story of the fifty pounds which George had stolen from the Buffalo on the eve of his imprisonment. She wondered, desperately, if the old woman was right, and he had hidden it in some corner of the house. She began to search, with the fierce enthusiasm of a seeker after treasure. She spent all her energy in turning the bedroom and kitchen inside out; she looked into the chimneys, for she had heard that money was sometimes hidden in such places. By the end of the day she was utterly exhausted but had found nothing. ‘At any rate,’ she thought, ‘the place looks tidier.’ A poor consolation!

That night it occurred to her that if only she could get as far as Shrewsbury she might pawn some of her wedding presents, particularly a set of plated tea-things which her father, lavish in the expenditure of other people’s money, had given her. They made a clumsy parcel, difficult to conceal, and in order to spend as little as possible on the railway fare she decided to walk over the hills towards Clun and catch a train on the branch railway. She left the children in Mrs Mamble’s care, and slipped away without letting Abner know that she had gone. In Shrewsbury a sad discouragement awaited her. The man in the pawnshop sniffed at her property. ‘This kind of thing’s gone out of fashion,’ he said. ‘If you’d brought it here five year ago I might have done better for you. Twenty-five shillings’s all it’s worth.’ The sacrifice hurt her, but she accepted his figure. The fare home to Llandwlas left her with a guinea in hand, and on that money they existed for more than two weeks. She only prayed that Abner would not notice the blank in the cupboard from which she had taken the silver, but she need not have been frightened, for Abner had no eye for things of that kind. One imprudence, however, nearly betrayed her. On the way to the station at Shrewsbury she had seen a box of oranges newly imported for Christmas and had not been able to resist the temptation of buying two for the children. Next day Abner saw them on the table.

‘Oranges?’ he said, his eyes shocked by her extravagance.

She lied quickly.

‘Yes, Mrs Hendrie met me on the road and gave me them for Morgan and Gladys.’

Afterward, in the curiously sensitive state of her conscience, this lie troubled her. He himself was so open with her that she felt it almost a duty to tell him the truth. She brooded over the question for several days, but in the end it sank into insignificance before the fact that they had no money left. Looking at her empty purse she felt that she could face the situation no longer. She dared not ask for credit in any shop in Mainstone, for she suspected that all the shop-people must be aware of her plight. Greatly daring, she made an expedition to Lesswardine and entered a grocer’s with whom she had not dealt since the days before her marriage. The man had been a friend of her father’s. Perhaps that would count for something.

It was Saturday night, and the shop was buzzing with people. The grocer, flurried with work, scarcely nodded to her, and she was nearly leaving the shop in fright when a new assistant whom she did not know asked her what he could serve her with. Fortunately, she had dressed herself with care and looked respectable. She ordered blindly, lavishly, and the smart young man dumped her purchases on the counter with a flourish and dashed off the bill with a pencil that he carried behind his ear in a hieroglyphic of his own.

‘Cash or account, madam?’ he asked rapidly.

‘Account,’ she murmured.

‘Certainly. What was the name?’

‘Mrs Malpas, Wolfpits.’

‘Of course,’ said the young man, excusing himself. ‘Pardon. Shall we send them?’

‘To-morrow’s Sunday, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘I think I’d better take them with me.’

‘Thank you, madam. Very kind of you,’ said the assistant, making a large blue-paper parcel, which he handed her over the counter with an obsequious bow.

She picked up her parcel and fled, thankful that the grocer was too busy to notice her. She felt that the eyes of all the women were on her and that they knew her for a thief. Also she knew that she could never attempt this adventure again.

So the end came, or what they thought must be the end. They sat together one night in the kitchen at Wolfpits, and both of them knew that they were beaten. A fire burned brightly in the hearth—in this thickly wooded valley they need never lack warmth—the room seemed cosy and almost gay in the firelight, showing no signs that they had fallen from prosperity, for though Mary had paid three more visits to the pawnbroker’s and now felt hardened to the adventure, she had always managed to conceal the deficiencies in the furniture by some new arrangement. On her last journey to Shrewsbury, hurrying to the station under the walls of the jail, the idea had struck her that she might be forced in the end to pawn her wedding ring, and she had laughed bitterly to herself. Much good had it done her! The idea had only struck her as a whimsical prospect. She had too much common sense to allow herself to be driven to this conventional expedient. She knew that they could not go on indefinitely stripping the house of its furniture. It would be far better to face the facts. If Abner could not find work, and there seemed no probability of his doing so, the best that they could do was to part. He must leave her, and she, pocketing her pride, must apply to the relieving officer, whom she had once shown to the door, for money from the parish. She knew that it must come to this, and yet she could not bring herself to tell Abner. She had settled in her mind that the proposal must come from him, and for the present he seemed numbed, worn, incapable of thinking. He sat opposite her in silence with an empty pipe between his teeth staring at the fire. After a little while she found herself silently weeping, and turned her face away from him, blowing her nose to hide her tears.

Some one knocked at the door, and she cried: ‘Come in!’

It was old Drew. They were not surprised. By this time they were used to the labourer’s visits. Often, in the evening, he would drop in with the excuse of having a talk with Abner, though most of the talking fell to Mary, and then, just as he was on the point of leaving, he would produce from one of the vast pockets in his coat some article of food that he had picked up at the farm. They knew so well this delicate subterfuge! At first Mary had been amused by it, and more than a little touched. Now she only waited impatiently to see what the old man had brought.

That night it seemed as if he would never go; but just when they had reached the point when it seemed that the eggs or turnips must appear, he turned to Abner and told him that he had some good news for him.

‘Good news?’ said Abner. ‘It’s a long time since I’ve heard anything of that.’

‘I was talking about ’ee to Mr Willums,’ said Drew, ‘and told en that you was in a purty bad way. “Well, Drew,” says he, “if it’s as bad as that, I don’t say we mightn’t do something. There do be a heap of stones scattered over the top fields as us might well be rid on. It do be a boy’s work, ’tis true, but Fellows might be glad of it.”’

Mary flushed with pleasure and clasped her hands. ‘I’d be glad of anything,’ said Abner.

‘Well,’ the old man went on, ‘I do reckon that there be no more’n a fortnight’s work there, and a poor, niggling job that’s like to break your back at that. But I thought you’d be glad of it, and I told en so. So up you comes along with me at six o’clock to-morrow morning, for I told en you’d come for sure. Threepence an hour he’ll pay ’ee. That makes twelve shillin’ a week. ’Tis not much, but ’tis something.’

They thanked him without reserve, but he shook his head at them. ‘I don’t know as it’s me you have to thank,’ he said. ‘’Tis your old mother down to the Buffalo as you’d ought to be grateful to. Mr Willums have took it into his head as giving Abner work would make her mazed. He’ve never forgive her over that cider, and never will. He’s a long memory, Mr Willums.’

When he left them Mary was so full of an emotional thankfulness that she could not speak. Abner went to bed cheerfully. She heard him whistling in his room above her.

Next morning his work at the Pentre began. As Mr Williams had said, it was a boy’s work by rights and unfitted to a man of Abner’s strength. At first sight it seemed like one of those labours which malignant kings impose upon their daughters’ suitors in fairy tales. The Pentre was a large farm of miserable land. Its uppermost cultivated fields reached nearly to the crown of the smooth hills at the valley head, ending abruptly at the foot of stony screes. From these unstable precipices the winter torrents rolled down many stones, flat rocky fragments that impeded the plough. Nor were these all, for the soil was so thin, that every ploughing turned up thousands more, and in winter the fields were overspread with a pale bloom of stones.

At this season of the year the uplands were always cold, enwrapped in icy vapours or glistening with frost that glued each fragment to the ground. Abner’s task was to clear these stubborn acres of their surface stones: an endless labour, for no sooner had he picked the surface over than new stones appeared. No convict labour could have been more monotonous, more thankless, nor, as it seemed, more futile. From dawn to sunset he worked in loneliness. No single human figure approached him all day long except that of Mr Williams, whom he would see coming like a speck in the lower distance urging his pony upwards. When he reached Abner the farmer would stay scowling at him for a few minutes. He was a surly man, and rarely spoke except on Monday evenings after Ludlow market. Then, having satisfied himself that Abner was not shirking, he would turn away and walk his pony down the hill again.

There was never any fear that Abner would not work. It was only by violent exertion that he could keep any heat in his body, for his food was poor, and the winter, as old Drew had prophesied, severe. He toiled there in rain, in sleet, in snow, and in blinding mist. The pay was so poor that he knew he could not afford to miss a day, picking up stones with numbed and ragged fingers when no other labourers were afield. Every evening he walked home dead tired, scarcely knowing if his legs were his own, for the continual stooping took all sensation away from them.

Once, in the dusk, he lost his way, for he had tried to shorten his journey by a cross-cut. He found himself suddenly on the brink of the sea-crows’ pool, but not a bird was to be seen, for in winter they returned to their homes on the Cardigan coast. His memory of what had happened there was as hazy as that of a dream. It seemed to him that he had lived half a lifetime since that night. He stumbled down through the fog and passed the door of Badger’s cottage. A light burned in the window, and he thought he saw Susie moving in the parlour. He laughed to himself and damned her . . . damned all women. Another evening on his way home a dog-cart overtook him coming over the hills from Clun. It had passed him before he saw that its occupants were Marion Prosser and a young farmer named Maddy, whom Abner only knew by sight. They bowled by him at a good pace. He wondered if she had recognised him, for he had been in their sight for some time. If she had, she made no sign of having seen him. And again he hardened his heart against all women.

And yet, though he did not know it, the sight of Abner trudging homeward down the lane had awakened a palpitating interest in Marion’s heart, and inspired her with a sudden distaste for the man who was sitting in the trap beside her. She looked down on him from the height of the driver’s seat, seeing his mean shoulders, the thin nape of his neck, and his small foxy face in profile. She felt that she would like to lash at him with the whip that she held in her hand; but since she knew that ladylike young women did not do such things, she flicked him with the lash of her tongue instead.

‘That was Fellows, our cowman, Fred,’ she said, knowing that the name would wound him.

He gave an ugly laugh. ‘I know him. He had the face to come and ask me for work. I soon gave him the right-about!’

‘You!’ she cried scornfully. ‘You’re not fit to talk to him! He’s twice the man that you are.’

He flushed. ‘Look here, Marion, who the hell do you think you’re talking to?’ he said, clutching her arm with a show of strength.

‘Don’t!’ she cried. She wrenched herself free and slapped his face. The horse broke into a canter.

‘That’s not the way to get yourself married,’ he said.

She would not reply to his insult and they drove to The Dyke in an uncomfortable silence.

Next day she set out deliberately to meet Abner on the road. She called ‘Good-evening’ to him, but he, still smarting under the discomfort of Mary’s outburst, would not answer her. She followed him and took him by the arm.

‘Abner,’ she said. ‘Will you ever forgive me? I don’t like to think of the way we parted.’

‘I don’t bear you any ill-will,’ he said. ‘That’s all over and done with.’‘I want you to think of me as a friend,’ she said. ‘Abner, if ever you’re in need of money . . . if you want money now . . . I wish you’d take it from me.’

He laughed. ‘I’m in work now,’ he said. ‘You’d best leave us alone. We don’t want your money.’ His resentment burst out afresh. ‘Nor you neither,’ he added.

She controlled herself. ‘Very well. That’s understood,’ she said, and left him without another word.

She walked home violently in the dusk, thinking of the desperate mess she had made of her life, wondering if she could ever bring herself to marry a man with sloping shoulders and a squeaky voice like Fred Maddy. What did it matter? What did anything matter?

Mr Williams had reckoned that the top fields would provide Abner with a fortnight’s work. He had merely given him the job to satisfy a passing whim of inflicting a pin-prick on Mrs Malpas, and had told him from the first that he could not continue to employ him when the work was done. Luckily for Abner at the end of the fortnight half the fields remained uncleared. Mr Williams recognised that he had worked well, and decided to keep him on, for perhaps another ten days. The expense was trivial, and the job worth doing. Christmas, his second Christmas at Wolfpits, intervened, but by the third of January Abner’s work at the Pentre was nearly finished.