“That’s a lucky dog of yours,” he said desperately, when the music ceased.

“That’s what I thought at your place,” she replied through the back of her head.

“Not had distemper yet?”

He saw her shoulders shudder. There was an awkward silence.

“You know I’d gladly look after him gratis,” he blundered on, “and you too.” Then, in a horrible consciousness of the pathological implication, he awaited the lash of her tongue.

But she must have been abstracted. For she only said politely: “Thanks very much. But I always go to Jorrow’s.”

Yes, he reflected bitterly, and always went there for other people unless Skindle’s was expressly stipulated.

But they were now approaching the first village after Chipstone, and the outside world intruded on the idyll. A dozen times he vaulted up and down to prevent interloping young men—sometimes armed with nosegays—receiving parcels too proximately; and he had a proud and malicious pleasure in their disconcerted unspoken surmise as to his privileged situation. The small coin of conversation appertaining to these deliveries Jinny did not refuse him, and every cluck she gave to Methusalem, every ripple of laughter on her busy way, deepened the spell. The unexpected faces; the quaint cottage interiors; the cheerful-smiling women in high green aprons who received stay-laces or bobbins, sugar or tea-packets, in bare dough-powdered or soap-frothed arms; the panting figures that tolled after the cart with forgotten bundles; the dogs—the fiercer in their barrels and boxes, the milder waving free and friendly tails; the quaint commissions and monitions, the salutations and farewells—“I’ll remember the twopence,” “And tell my brother, won’t you, about the christening,” “I don’t want any more of her puddings, they put the miller’s eye out”—all this fascinating bustle and chatter, spiced with friendly laughter, seemed to belong to an enchanted earth of which gaiety was the ground-note, not animal groaning. The windings of her horn completed his sense of fairyland.

In the remoter woodland regions he was possessed alternately with a disapprobation of her recklessness in trusting herself thus alone with a male, far from help, and a surprise at his own passivity in so provoking and romantic a situation. Of course he was going to behave like the gentleman he was, but why was she so irritatingly sure of it? Did she think he wasn’t flesh and blood? She might at least show some consciousness of his chivalry!

But his resentment at her professional nonchalance only served to confirm his long-standing suspicion that here at last was the girl for him: that he was choosing well if not wisely. Doubtless Chipstone and his mother would say he was marrying too much beneath him. But look at the farmers’ daughters—what lumps beside her! He admitted, of course, that the Blanche of Foxearth Farm to whom his mother mainly aspired was an exception, but then this Purley minx was hopelessly out of reach, stuck up on her pedestal of beauty, conceit, and culture, and throwing over even her affianced wooers. As for his neighbour, the chemist’s girl—what could his mother see in her except that annuity which would not even survive her, and she not looking particularly strong! No, with the present satisfactory amount of sheep-rot, glanders, and distemper he could afford to please himself. And if Jinny couldn’t play the piano like the land-surveyor’s widow, why one must content oneself with the horn, pending initiation into the higher life. Together they would work up the business. With Jinny’s connexion—though of course she must give up carrying and become a lady—there would surely be a trail of sick beasts in her wake: Jorrow would soon be out-distanced. They would live away from his office; that could all be turned into dog-hospital.

Such were the kennels in the air built by the enamoured Elijah as he sat on boxes or hampers or panted under their weight in his officious deliveries: an officiousness which drove out of her head the keg of oil destined for Uckford Manor.

“Oh, dear!” she murmured suddenly, a mile later.

Forcing the explanation from her, he cried joyfully, “Let’s go back.”

Jinny shook her head. “No time,” she said, and flicked at Methusalem.

“But I don’t mind being late.”

“I’m not thinking of you—but of the pig.”

“Bother the pig.”

“Is that the way you study your patients?”

“I’ve got better things to study.” He could only say it to her back, but he threw enough intensity into it to come out on the other side of her.

“Indeed!” The back seemed impenetrable. “You going into another business?”

“Why ever should I when I’m getting on so famously—ten pound a week, if a penny.” It was an opportunity made to his hand. “I know,” he went on, as the back remained rigid, “that folks pretend it’s not as high-class as real doctoring, but believe me it needs more brains.”

“Does it?”

“Stands to reason. A human being can tell you what he feels and where the pain lays, but with a dumb beast you’ve got only your own sense and skill to go on: it’s us vets that should really be at the top of the profession.”

“But sick babies are dumb too,” Jinny reminded him.

“Sick babies have talking mammas,” he replied genteelly.

Jinny did not imitate them, and silence fell again, tempered by Methusalem’s snappings. Really, it was very awkward, Elijah felt, thus proposing to a girl behind her back. But he struggled gallantly. “Take stomach staggers now—if those horses you saw waiting to be killed this evening had been treated in time——!”

“The horses in your field?” cried Jinny, shocked. “But they looked so lively.”

“They’re all like that,” he explained. “Once out of harness they get a bit jaunty again, but they’re worth more dead than alive.”

“It’s dreadful killing off a horse that has served one!” Jinny burst out. “Just for a few shillings!”

“A few shillings? Why there’s horses over two-fifty pounds! Flesh, I mean,” he explained, with a chuckle. “Not to mention the skin, hair and bones. Why, there’s eighty pounds of intestines for sausage-skins!”

“Oh, do hold your tongue!” cried Jinny, feeling sick again.

“Yes, and what about his tongue!” retorted Elijah triumphantly. “It ain’t only Frenchies that get that. And his tail waving for funerals! And his hoofs in your own shoe-buttons!”

Jinny felt indeed as though hoofs had descended on her feet, and she could almost have sacrificed Methusalem’s high-waving tail to adorn her passenger’s obsequies.

“My neighbour, the chemist—he buys the blood!” continued the ghoulish Elijah. “He makes it into——”

But just here at a cross-road Jinny’s horn signalled to a smart young man in a velvet waistcoat, who was driving a trap, and brought him to a standstill. Would Barnaby deliver a keg of oil at Uckford Manor if he was passing that way?

That Manor was, it transpired, the one goal and purpose of Barnaby’s journey.

Jinny—well aware young Purley was homeward bound for Foxearth Farm—gave him a radiant smile, and Elijah threw him the keg and a furious look, a reliable fellow-feeling informing him that the velvety liar was going at least two miles out of his way. Downright dishonest he felt it, seeing that neither the young man’s time nor his trap was his own, but belonged to his father, the hurdle-maker. But what could you expect of Blanche’s brother? Let Jinny beware of the family fickleness, let her lean on a less showy but manlier breast.

“I wonder you don’t arrange your things village by village instead of letting ’em lay all over the vehicle,” he observed as she drove on.

“I shan’t forget where to drop you,” came the answer over her cold shoulder.

Then silence fell more painfully than ever, and the monotonous tick-tack of Methusalem maddened his conscious ear. The monstrous possibility began to loom up that Jinny’s affections were pre-engaged to some one of these numerous young men. His eye fell upon a coil of rope hung round a loose hoop of the tilt, and morbid thoughts of using it—whether on the young men or himself was not clear—floated vaguely in his usually serene soul. Presently he noted other coils on other ribs, and their plurality suggested it was for the young men, not himself, that rope was appropriate. What else were they there for, he wondered dully? Yes, let her fiancÉs go hang: engagements could always be broken off—nothing venture, nothing have!

To nerve himself for the great question he took advantage of the pause at Long Bradmarsh while Methusalem was drinking at the trough of “The King of Prussia.” But this imitation of Methusalem on a stronger fluid was fatal, for in Jinny’s persistent silence, the animal’s tick-tacks now grew soothing: he settled himself more comfortably on the emptier floor of the cart, with his head on a soft bundle, and watched the nape of Jinny’s neck till it faded into a great white sea of floating ice. He was struggling in it for hours, but at last the cold waves passed over his head, and Jinny, turning to throw out a parcel, saw that his cap had fallen off in his writhings, leaving his baldness almost indecently glaring.

So deep was he in his daymare that he was quite unaware of Jinny’s colloquy with another male whom her horn had hailed as they passed over the bridge to Little Bradmarsh. Not that there was anything in Ephraim Bidlake to excite apprehension, for he was a stalwart Peculiar, safely married, and residing with his family and two twin-nieces of his wife’s—Sophy and Sally—on board the billyboy whose great boomless black sail Jinny had espied darkening the water with its shadow. Bidlake’s barge was a cross between a Norfolk wherry and a ferry-boat, and plied up and down the Brad, loading at the wharves with its half-lowered mast for crane, or carrying man and cattle across the bridgeless sections when it had nothing better to do. There was not much money coming in at the best, and it was often Jinny’s privilege to eke out the barge’s larder under pretence of presents for the motherless Sophy and Sally, so tragically fathered. For Ephraim Bidlake, a shaggy giant with doglike eyes, had brought the “little furriners” from Hampshire when their mother died after their father—Mrs. Bidlake’s brother—had been transported to Botany Bay for burning a rick in some old agricultural riot against the introduction of machinery. The blot on their scutcheon had been concealed from the new neighbourhood, but had been gradually confided by Mrs. Bidlake to Jinny with protestations of her brother’s innocence—had he not been made a constable in the very convict ship? By degrees, too, she had conveyed to the girl a vivid picture of the trial and deportation. For the devoted sister had walked the bulk of the way to Winchester, in the hope of proving his innocence by collecting testimonies to his character, and had joined the mob of weeping women who hung round the gaol gates night and day, or crowded the court, only to witness the sanctimonious cruelty of the bewigged judges, and the tragic exodus of the damned in the prison coach, guarded by a file of soldiers, to lie in the hulks at Southampton till they were shipped to savage Australia, there to be assigned to brutal stockowners. It was an experience which had cost Mrs. Bidlake dear; her next child had been stillborn, and to this day she had never reared but one more infant, and that a still delicate one. But for the comfort of the Peculiar faith it would have been a cheerless household. She was now again brought to bed: it was to inquire about her that Jinny had hailed the barge, and very sad she was to learn from Brother Bidlake—when he had punted within earshot—that the new baby had succumbed after a few hours, though the “missus,” thank God, was recovering and the twins were “wunnerful good and helpful.” She was not sorry, however, that the undoctored infant had departed with a precipitation which rendered an inquest unlikely, for inquests were the bane of the Brotherhood.