FOLLY CORNER

THE steam of that stifling London day rose up in a choking, enervating haze from the hot grass. The shrill cries of children, loose from the Board School, cut the thick air. A train rushed across the bridge. Two or three cyclists tinkled their bells irritably as they spun down Wood Lane to the Uxbridge Road, leaving a cloud of gray grit behind them. Omnibuses pulled up at the corner of the short street near the few newly-built shops. From Portobello Road came the heavy rumble of more traffic, mixed with the nearer shout of costers vending dried fish and over-ripe fruit.

She was a young woman. She stood still, in a limp, hopeless attitude, her face turned on Wormwood Scrubbs, her strained eyes vacantly fastened on the buildings, spires, and chimneys in the distance.

Some simple sound from the frowning prison on her left made her turn her head with the swift, watching movement of a cat. But there was nothing to see; no hint, no hope. Behind those walls! Her throat, rising white and firm from the tumbled collar of the cotton blouse, contracted. Those walls! those impenetrable walls! those relentless walls!

She put out two hands in baggy gloves; she held them up, flat palms upward, toward the speechless prison. Her attitude was one of strong appeal, of hope, almost—as if she half expected that despair would work a miracle. They stretched out, big, strong, shapeless in the old gloves—those quivering, appealing hands of hers.

With a sharp agonized movement of the wrists she let her hands drop nervelessly to her side. A sob was strangled in her throat; she turned her head abruptly, so that her eyes no longer rested on the walls. With a sudden impulse she started running across the grass; ran across the road and under the bridge to the spot where an omnibus was waiting.

It grew dusk as she rattled back on the garden-seat to London. One by one the lights of night gleamed out. The life of night began. She looked down and saw the interior of smoothly rolling carriages, with women in evening dress lying idly back inside. Women on foot, smartly clad and with happy faces, flitted along the white pavements. Women clambered to the top of the omnibus, chattering and tittering. The one who sat next her glanced curiously at her grim mouth and shadowed eyes.

The lights grew thicker; fantastic chains of light—red and yellow. London glittered like some fairy mine of jewels: jewels already cut and polished, every facet gleaming. Words winked out letter by letter, then vanished. She saw them come and go on the fronts of the houses. OX FORCE—NINON SOAP—DUNN’S NOSTRUM. To her strained senses they lost all common meaning and symbolized the weird, the threatening, the unknown.

*****

It was blinding hot in the market town that Wednesday. Sheep straggled into the pens; the drovers choked and cursed as the dust dried in their throats. A smart trap, driven by a girl, with a groom behind, bowled down the High Street, leaving behind an impression of coolness and smartness. Now and again a sharp, imperious cycle-bell cut the air, and as some female cyclist darted by pedestrians heard the soft flutter of sleeves, like the flapping sails of a yacht.

A man came, with a slightly rolling walk, down the street. He made an imperial progress, nodding his head bluffly to deferential shopkeepers who stood at their doors, exchanging a jovial word or so with other substantial yeomen. Everyone knew and respected Jethro Jayne—“Young Jethro” of Folly Corner. Everyone in and around Liddleshorn knew that there had been Jaynes at Folly in unbroken succession since before the days of Cromwell.

He was a picturesque figure, with his open, weather-tanned face, his clean-shaven lip, his buff breeches, and brown gaiters. He wore a linen coat and a flapping white linen hat. His eyes were lazily merry and roguish under the starched brim.

He turned in at the door of the inn, with the low-pitched, paneled dining-room, where most of the farmers dined on market-day.

A round-faced, pretty girl brought him his plate of beef and his two vegetables. Bread and cheese, and a jug of sweet cider, completed the meal.

He looked at her thoughtfully whenever she approached: so very blue-eyed and round; such a plump, neat figure in a black gown! He looked at her through a strong cloud of smoke as he puffed at his pipe and drank a last glass of the cider. She had suggested something. He was thoughtfully asking himself, Why not?

Presently he took a pencil and a letter from his breeches pocket. He began to write on the back of the envelope, making many erasions, knitting his brows and pouting his lips like an anxious child.

The girl came softly to the table and took away the mustard for another customer. Jethro never looked up at her. She had done her part. She had suggested.

He paid the bill and emerged into High Street. He looked a trifle more bluff and lurching than before. His face was red—with cider, with the excitement of his daring plan.

For the first time in his life he was yielding to impulse. Already he half regretted yielding. He was afraid of himself; he was more afraid of Gainah.

Yet he bent his head and went down two steps into the editorial offices of the Liddleshorn Herald. The place was empty save for a sharp-featured youth who was lounging at the side of the counter. He sharply asked the visitor what he wanted. He was a new importation, an embryo journalist, with a London journal as his goal. He touched the town side of things only. He had a smoldering contempt for farmers, and knew nothing of the master of Folly Corner.

Jethro pushed his envelope across the counter with a sheepish gesture.

“How many insertions?” asked the youth laconically, yet throwing an amused, curious glance at the big figure which stood near the door—an unconscious, unappreciated color scheme—in white and russet, buff and brown.

“How many times in?” The gentleman-farmer’s big, embarrassed laugh seemed to shake the silent place. “Well—once.”

As he went slowly out of the town the tinkle of a piano came out clearly from the front room of a little buff villa. There were rows of these buff villas on the outskirts of the town. Some navvies were putting down new drain-pipes. The notes of the piano and the reedy voice of a girl came out slowly, each note isolated and mingled with the nervous tap of the pickax. Jethro stood still and listened. It was a song of Purcell’s:

“To make us seek ruin, to make us seek ruin and love those that hate.”

He walked on, a queer stirring at his heart. The thin voice of the girl in the villa had touched the romantic spot in him. He thought of that other girl at the inn—plump, blue-eyed, smiling. He thought of his carefully-worded advertisement which, by to-morrow, would be worming its way through Sussex, through Surrey and Hampshire to London perhaps.

It was a joke; he began to regret, to blame the cider, or the demure little rings of light hair on the waitress’ unlined brow.

And yet he could still hear the piano. He still felt the slow, wondering work of his heart.

FOLLY CORNER.

[CHAPTER I.]

THE story begins with the emotions of two women—the two women principally concerned—on a morning ten days after Jethro Jayne had imprudently indulged in sweet cider at the market dinner in Liddleshorn.

One woman was young—twenty-five or less. She was a big, fair girl; a handsome girl, in the elementary way that satisfies most men. She looked well able to take care of herself; an up-to-date girl, accustomed to fight her way alone, to meet men on their own ground, to jealously look after her own interests. There was, however, an occasional haggard line at her mouth, and in her well-opened, rather prominent gray eyes was a hunted, hopeless look.

She wore a coat and skirt, with sleeves of last year’s cut. Her hat was trimmed with strict attention to fashion, and yet bore the brand “home-made.” There was a crisp new veil tied about the brim.

She smacked so of cities that the few people she met turned round to slowly gape at her, and a couple of small girls coming home from the village shop laughed aloud in her angry face.

She walked slowly along the white road, stopping now and then to lift her veil and wipe her burning cheeks.

The scenery was beautiful—with the characteristic beauty of the Sussex Weald. But she did not notice: she was too preoccupied. Her own affairs were in a critical state, and when one is anxious there is small consolation in undulating hills, long stretches of pasture, and red-roofed farmhouses. Her attitude was quite cockney—prim regard for her shoes and half-contemptuous admiration of her surroundings predominated.

Once she stopped to rest. A thatched and plastered cottage stood empty under the shadow of huge oaks. Wide green glades wound into the very heart of a little wood. The turf, inch-deep in moss, yielded like down. It was irresistible. She threw herself flat on her back, settling her skirt smoothly under her, and looked lazily through the wide mesh of the veil at the sky. The heat and the perfect silence almost made her sleep. A trap went by full of gayly-dressed country girls; a young man, hideous in his Sunday clothes, was driving. They were all off to some festivity, and they looked curiously at the prone figure on the turf. At first they thought it was some tramp, but the thin-soled morocco shoes stuck out from the dusty skirt contradicted that assumption. Such vagrant ways these town folk had! They laughed derisively, and the sound roused her. She sat up and stared a trifle vaguely at the watchful hills, the glades of the wood, the white, winding ribbon of highroad. Then she rose and whisked her skirt and went on again.

Only once more was she tempted to stop—at a bramble bush where the blackberries were loose and juicy. She drew up her veil to her nose and drew them off the stalks with widely parted lips, because she was anxious not to soil the fingers of her gloves. It was so necessary to make a good impression: the woman who could always make a good impression had the world at her feet.

She crossed a common; fowls were scratching and shaking their wings in the mounds of dust; a long string of geese waddled by, conversing volubly, and with evident arrogance. A man with a timber wagon came toward her, and she stopped him to ask the way. He told her that she had a mile or more to go.

She went on, her feet dragging at every step. At every step she grew more nervous, more undecided. She took a letter from her pocket and read it over twice. She stopped, half turned back. Her face was violent red and chalk-white in turn. Still she went on, with lagging, heavy feet and a queer, terrified shame and excitement at her heart: went on over that open common which was just beginning to flush with heather. Another man came by, driving a black pig. It grunted, and seemed to run in every direction but the right one. He looked a stupid man; but, then, they were all half-witted in the country. She said—very slowly and deliberately, as if she were speaking to a small child—that she wanted Folly Corner. He gave a vacillating grin, keeping one eye on the pig, and pointed to a substantial stack of chimneys on the left.

“That be Folly,” he said laconically, and left her.

She could see the house through the dense leafage of three great elms. She stood, with one hand firmly gripping her gay parasol, and the other twitching at the crisp edge of her veil. She looked at the red gables, at the spreading outbuildings, at the garden, at the yard; she looked back at the hot road cutting across the common. Should she go back or should she go on? For a moment she closed her eyes, and immediately the dark, straight wall of the prison shot up slowly like a specter and chilled her.

The prison! The prison and the one damned, dear soul beating within its walls! But that was past. She had wrestled out that finally—at night, in her London room, close beneath the slates; at night, in her bed, the letter under her pillow, or twisting in her hot fingers.

The gate which led into the garden was a white wicket. At each side was a poplar. These had grown so thick and tall that they met midway and formed an arch. There was a path of red brick, a little raised, leading up to the house door; it led up straight, between box edgings two feet high. The garden-beds were rather neglected, but a great clump of red-hot pokers pointed flame fingers to the sky, and a loose white rose, like foam, clung to the walls and ran along the low roof. There was a long window each side the door, and in front of the one on the right was a yew-tree clipped into the shape of an umbrella. The clipping had been neglected, and the tree had the dishevelled appearance of a man who neglects to shave. There was an air of indolence about the garden, but it did not seem the indolence of poverty. A pond partly encircled the place. A red-and-white cow came down to drink and to look at her reflectively with its big, closely-veined eyes.

What sort of greeting was garnering for her beyond that door with the wooden hood, the veil of white roses, and the rough iron knocker? She looked at a Virginia creeper twisting among the roses. Autumn had touched it. She looked at the red leaves, then at the white flowers. They seemed flame and pale fire to strained eyes, short of sleep and dazzled with the sun. The deep, haggard line curved round her mouth. Within! What waited within?

*****

Within was the second woman, old Gainah Toat. She sat in a low-pitched room—the room on the right, made dark by the umbrella yew. There was a great open hearth. There were three doors: one led into a dairy; it was open, and showed the bricked floor, the yellow and brown pans, the thick cream and made-up butter; the second door opened into the passage; the third into the garden.

She sat by the third door, which was thrown well back. She could see the orchard strewn with mussel plums, ripe to rottenness, with little yellow stewing pears and apples specked with black. She did not seem to see anything; she had those eyes—cold blue with a dash of gray—that are always dull; eyes that evade and puzzle. They were very wide open, the lids rolled well back, and the lashes sparse.

She had a white face; there was a general appearance of wasting about her. The fingers, holding a letter—the other woman had been influenced by a letter too—were twisted and disfigured with rheumatism. Her body was flat and square; her faded gown made no pretense of slurring the defect. It went straight from her stringy throat to her hardly perceptible hips without a break, without a kindly fold or ruck of the stuff.

She was an odd-looking figure; a spectral woman almost—with her bloodless skin, her dead eyes, her twisted, transparent hands. But the people around Folly Corner were not given to fanciful imaginings; they only knew that Gainah seemed made of iron, that she worked on the farm without tiring from sunrise until night. Her life was spent in making things for other people to eat. She belonged to a dying type: she was one of those women who devote themselves to tickling the masculine palate. Machine-made food did not enter into her economy. Her mushroom ketchup, her marmalade, her blackberry jelly were renowned. She gave them to anyone who asked, not because she was generous, but because she was inordinately proud of her productions. She toyed with medicine too; made balm tea, and, from a particular sort of nettle, green ointment that would cure a gathering. She made herb beer and water cider to save beer at harvest-time. She knew the effect of foxglove on the human heart, and made a concoction of a certain herb which she gathered secretly. With it she claimed to cure palsy. She was mistress at Folly Corner. She had come to old Jethro Jayne when his wife died. She had brought up the present master by hand; she ruled him still.

Every master of Folly Corner had been a Jayne, and every male Jayne had been a Jethro since the first farmer had hidden his pet mare for ten days in a cellar so that Cromwell’s Ironsides should not steal her.

The room was always cool because the yew threw a continual shadow. Gainah, sitting without a glint of sun in her chilly blue gown and with her feet flat on the stone floor, seemed to have no part with the hot, throbbing world outside.

They were threshing on the farm; the whirring sound hummed in and the smell from the engine hung on the air. On the south wall a man, by her orders, was cutting back the foliage from the vine so that the sun might get freely at the Sweet-water grapes. In a few weeks it would be time to think about wine-making. The busiest time of the year was coming on. She hadn’t a moment to waste. She should at that moment have been straining the mushroom-juice from the salt and boiling it with spices. But the letter, fluttering in her veined, gnarled hand, had made her an idle woman before noon. She read it again with the weighty deliberation of an almost illiterate person. It was written in a dashing but undecided hand, and the words were stilted. Evidently the writer had been ill at ease.

She got up stiffly at last and moved about the room, flicking a duster over the ancient furniture. There was an oak cupboard reaching to the ceiling—a double corner cupboard with delicate brass escutcheons and an inlaid border of boxwood.

She ran the duster down the dark panels and breathed softly on the brass. Then she took out her keys from her apron pocket and opened the doors of the upper half. There were three shelves, the edge of each scalloped out. On every shelf were bottles and jars full of preserves and pickles. She touched them quite tenderly, looking at the faintly written labels, pursing up her colorless lips and moving her head spasmodically.

She shut the cupboard at last and went slowly on her journey round the room. She dusted the oak sideboard, the long oak table, with the form against the wall and the carved joint stools—the high one for the master, the low one for the dame—at each end. She dusted the chairs, some of solid oak, some of golden beech with rush seats. She dusted the clock; its hand pointed ominously to twelve.

It was about time then. In a few minutes she should be here. Gainah chuckled a little, remembering that she had purposely neglected to send the trap to the station. All the men were at harvest, and she had wanted old Chalcraft to trim the vine. She sat down by the door again, looking out blankly at the warmth and life. There were thick parchment-like mushrooms dotted over the meadow beyond the quickset hedge, and in the orchard fruit kept thudding softly from the trees. It was the beginning of rich autumn, when one makes provision for winter. She was always so busy through August and September; on her feet until late at night—late for Folly Corner—straining and boiling, and pulping and stirring; scolding the two maids and tyrannizing over Jethro.

Those mushrooms had been in salt too long; the wind-fall apples were almost past preserving. It was washing-day, too—they had washed on the first Monday in the month for thirty years. The soapy smell floated into the dining-parlor; she could hear the rasping sound of the brush and the gurgling swill of suds. She heard also the cackle of the two maids and the mellow voice of the elderly washerwoman. They were wasting their time. Yet she didn’t move. Her eyes fell to the letter which she had taken out of her pocket again. Her lips mumbled the signature—“PAMELA CRISP.”

After thirty-three years! And she had served his father before him! It was very hard! She wouldn’t give up her keys—he wouldn’t expect that. She smiled dryly. He wouldn’t expect that—he was a Jayne and he knew when he was well off. He would never get anyone else to slave so. Even the green tomatoes were pickled—with onions and apples and mysterious spices. She was the only woman for miles round who had the recipe, and before she died she meant to burn it, having no daughter to bequeath it to. And scarlet runners put down every year for winter eating. Her butter had never been known to have a twang. She could make cakes without fat and used snow for puddings when eggs were scarce.

The bed in the best room had been made under her eye from the feathers of birds killed on the farm.

Birds! It was not many henwives who could manage to hatch a full sitting. She never thought fifteen eggs too many to put under a hen; the Dorking might manage even more. The gray-and-white hen—didn’t it steal a nest of twenty-two and come clucking home at the end of three weeks with nineteen chicks, most of them pullets, too! A young, flighty woman would have spoilt everything by poking about and interfering with the bird. She had known all along that it was sitting in the barn, but she wasn’t going to let it know she knew. Young women spoilt their lives by haste. They spoilt the lives of other people too. Her eye dropped again to the dashing signature—“PAMELA CRISP.”

She sat brooding by the door, thinking proudly of all her domestic achievements and telling herself piteously that Jethro would never allow her to be displaced. Of course, she had known that he would marry some day, but then, in her own mind, she had picked him out a wife: pretty, soft-looking Nancy from Turle House. A wife—pliable and a little foolish, like Nancy—would not have mattered. But a cousin on the mother’s side! An unknown girl from London! A girl whose capital “P” trailed to the edge of the envelope!

She got up again and went round the dull room in her halting way, dusting and tidying mechanically. Then all at once she straightened her back and listened. There were light steps on the brick path which led round to the garden door. The clip-clip of the shears ceased. There were two voices—a young feminine one and the hoarse croak of old Chalcraft, who was past work, and lived out his life of long service like an ancient horse, doing light jobs, so that he might still believe himself useful and independent.

Gainah went out, the sun on her uncovered head, with its wide parting and gray-brown hair. She went round the corner. Chalcraft was on the ladder still. The shears yawned in his tremulous hand; he had clipped to the wall, and the Sweet-waters hung close to it and stripped of foliage, pale green and luscious. The long trails of grayish leaves were on the path; the girl trod them down. When she saw the elder woman she made a step forward. She seemed half defiant, half ashamed. Her hat was on one side; it gave her a rakish air of towns. Such a slight thing may imperil a woman’s reputation—in prejudiced eyes. Gainah’s cold eyes contracted, and her brows drew over them a harsh ridge.

Pamela put out her hand—in a new glove. A slim gold bracelet, from which dangled a green charm, swung on her wrist.

“You must be Gainah,” she said in a conciliating way, and smiling.

Then she added, with a faint touch of injury, “I wrote to say I was coming this morning. I hoped that you would send to meet me. It’s a long walk.”

Gainah gave her a sharp look; she thought that this was the first indication of authority.

“It’s harvest-time,” she said curtly; “the best harvest for seventeen years. Come inside.”

They both slipped over the threshold of that dim gray room with the stone floor and the solid family furniture. Pamela gave a swift glance round to see if the room was empty. There was a flaming spot on each cheek, and her glittering eyes moved uneasily behind her loose veil.

“I’d like to put myself tidy,” she said in the confiding whisper of one woman to another, “before I go in to him.”

“To your Cousin Jethro?” Gainah’s dull eyes fastened on the hectic face.

“To my Cousin Jethro—yes,” she laughed nervously; then added quickly, “It seems strange to call him ‘cousin.’ We’ve—we’ve never met. You got my letter? Yes. I—I want to be friends.”

Gainah didn’t answer. She only opened the door leading to the stairs. The two went up together. There was a high window halfway up, with a lattice of thick oak bars.

“No glass,” said Pamela in astonishment.

“They didn’t use glass in the days when that was cut,” Gainah said, “and the Jaynes are not people to go with new-fangled ways. Every Jayne says that what was good enough for his father is good enough for him. It’s a family not given to changing. You ought to know that; you belong to it.”

“On the mother’s side—yes,” returned the girl in a half-hearted way.

Gainah opened the door of her own bedroom. It was poorly furnished with her own furniture, which she had brought with her to Folly Corner. There was a wooden bedstead, painted clay color and touched with lines of apple-green. The washstand and drawers matched it. There was a strip or so of shabby felt carpet, and on the shelf a pair of brass candlesticks and a red china cow milked by a diminutive woman. The girl looked about her disdainfully, assertiveness getting the better of nervousness. She took off her hat and veil before the murky glass, splashed water over her face, patted her hair caressingly, arranged again the smart hat and veil. Gainah watched this pretty toying of youth with grim disapproval; even the girl’s big arms lifted to her head were an offense.

“Like a brass button in a sweep’s eye, all glitter,” the old woman mumbled to herself, as the yellow and green bracelet swung on the round wrist and the jet buckles flashed in the elaborate hat.

On the way downstairs she was afforded a peep into other bedrooms.

“I can’t let you have the best spare room,” she declared autocratically. “This is it. It’s never used, except for layin’s out and weddin’ nights, and layin’s in. All the Jaynes, right back to King Charles, have been born in that bed—and died in it afterward.”

Pamela looked at the ponderous piece of furniture and shuddered.

“I wouldn’t sleep there for worlds,” she said.

Gainah, her claw-like hand caught stiffly round the banisters to help her progress, went slowly down, stair by stair. Pamela, close behind her, looked contemptuous—of everything: the old-fashioned place, the odd old woman.

They crossed the room which the yew made so dark. Gainah opened the door into the narrow corridor. Pamela followed. There was a window looking out at the garden. On the ledge were blood-red geraniums, and on the distempered walls queer prints in black frames.

She didn’t approve of those crinkled, brownish prints; they were hardly decent.

Gainah flung open the door of the other room.

“Jethro,” she said in her high, grating voice, “here’s your Cousin Pamela—on the mother’s side.”

[CHAPTER II.]

THE girl winced and hung back, as one does at physic or a possible blow. She looked along the narrow passage, as if for the support of another woman. But Gainah had hobbled away, shutting the door behind her. Pamela stood alone. She looked round her—at the oak table strewn with papers—old copies of the Field and Farm and Home.

There were a pair of driving-gloves thrown down, and a whip with a broken thong. There was a great blue bowl half full of waste paper and ends of string. A pair of brass candlesticks winked on the ledge beside the vivid geraniums. She gave a second nervous look at the colored prints in black frames, prints of which she did not quite approve. A full voice from inside the room said impatiently, “Come in.”

She didn’t advance, so the voice added, with a mellow laugh in it, “Come in. Why did Gainah go away? Come in, Cousin Pamela. I cannot move from this confounded sofa.”

So he was crippled! Her wild gray eyes darted across the garden and along the hot road. If she could only just softly open that door and slip out without seeing him! A cripple! She might have known that there was something.

“Come in.”

She made a desperate step forward: it was so like a fool to stay outside. She had come to the house on certain business, and she must go through with it. Her foot in the arched morocco shoe tapped on the bare oak floor. Then it sunk into a thick carpet. She could not see the occupant of the room yet; he was on a couch in the bay window which looked across the harvest fields. All that she could see was a wall hung with gorgeous flowered paper, a carpet with a green ground and bunches of Provence roses, a round walnut table, and a piano with a closed lid.

It was like coming from December to June at a breath—this transit from the dim ancestral living-room to the parlor with the walnut and velvet suite from the best shop in Liddleshorn. Yet Pamela hardly noticed. The only thing that mattered was the sofa in the bay window. Would that man, that cripple on the sofa, be favorably impressed with her?

She was sick and hot with apprehension. Had any girl been in such a position before? She began to think dimly of early tales that she had read of slave markets, of a poem learnt and recited at school about a quadroon girl.

Of course old Gainah didn’t know all—didn’t know anything that was truth. What an odd old woman! Not pleasant to live with. Not a cheerful house in which to spend the winter! She went slowly over that thick carpet to the bay window, her head down, her upper lip caught fiercely over her lower. When she reached the sofa she was in an agony of shame, and hardly lifted her eyes.

Jethro said, almost tenderly:

“Do sit down.”

The words were simple, but she liked him from that moment. She felt sure of him. He wouldn’t be—coarse. She sat down. There was a low walnut chair with a green cover drawn into the bay all ready. Then she dared to look up.

Jethro was flat on his back. He was so spare that his body seemed to curve inward; but it was the spareness of a tough, muscular man. His upper lip was bare and his eyes were keen, merry blue. A life of sunshine and wind and rain had tanned his skin. The backs of his hairy hands looked as if they had been steeped in tobacco juice; beyond his wrist, where his coat sleeve pushed up, his skin was milky. He wore an Oxford shirt with an unstarched collar. She saw a ring of milk-white skin when he turned his head to look at her, and immediately above it he was the color of delicate old leather.

She looked at his handsome face and muscular body with interest. Well! It might be worse—or better. A little round table with a red and gold cloth was within touch. He put out his hand and touched a toppling pile of letters.

“These were all answers,” he said, smiling drolly. “I had them addressed to Liddleshorn post-office, as you know. Three hundred and fifty. I shall get some more to-morrow morning, no doubt.”

“Don’t!” she cried out sharply, “oh, don’t! It—it—it—a man doesn’t know.... A woman has little secret shames—you won’t understand.... I wish I hadn’t come. Three hundred and fifty girls! Oh! They are not coming here, too?”

She stopped, panting. Her eyes were on those letters, letters in every shape and color, some with gilt monograms on the back, one with a gilt “Nell.” She looked at the handwriting, some blotted and some scrawling, some neatly masculine and clerk-like. Her face looked old, her eyes blistered with tears.

Jethro struggled to rise. Then with a groan of pain and sharp twist of his injured leg he fell back on the cushions.

Her back was firm against the carved walnut of the green-seated chair, as they sat in such strange conference in the deep shadow of the bay. Through the hot mist of her tears she saw the harvest field, half clipped, like the shorn head of beauty. A big brown fellow of a humble bee came through the open casement and settled on her. She flinched. Jethro regarded it as an omen.

“When a humble bee flies in at the open window and lights on a stranger and flies out again, it’s a sign the stranger will not stay long,” he said, looking quite disturbed as the insect droned out into the sun again.

She looked at him with mild contempt, thinking it most extraordinary that a big fellow such as he was should entertain such notions.

There were the usual sounds of fully blown summer; petulant buzz of overworked insects, voices of harvesters, the whirr of the engine. Taps from the smithy at the corner intensified in Pamela’s aching head; ever afterward she regarded smithy sounds as indispensable to the perfection of an August day.

Suddenly she broke out passionately:

“I can’t stay. I shouldn’t have come. It is the sort of thing that a barmaid, a shop girl—someone a little reckless—would do. I am different.” She stretched her hand and directed it haughtily toward the letters. “I am not like these others. But it was a temptation: such a rest, such a certainty for the future. And ... it was half a joke, too.”

Jethro put out his immense brown hand and gripped her by the forefinger and thumb round the wrist. She looked fully at him for the first time, and, in spite of herself, she liked his face. It was handsome. The thin high nose and beautifully curved lips made it even aristocratic. She was a shallow town product, and had a flimsy horror of anything that she considered coarse. Yet she admitted that on this man’s face was no touch of boorishness. He looked, so she thought, like a patrician who was masquerading in queer clothes. Her idea of masculine raiment was confined to black cloth, with tweeds for the seaside and flannel for tennis.

“I like you,” he said simply. “You are a nice-minded girl. It was a joke with me, too—half a joke. I did it on market day; a fellow gets a bit jolly then, perhaps. I shouldn’t have gone any further with these.” He touched the letters with his free hand, and the touch was enough to scatter them rudely on the floor. “But your name took my fancy. PAMELA CRISP! Now, my mother was a Crisp.”

“Yes, so you told me in your letter,” she said faintly, and gently fluttering her white, veined wrist in its handcuff. “You told me to write and tell Miss Toat that we were cousins—on the mother’s side. I did it—as a joke. Oh! a joke—you believe me?”

“Of course—a joke. It is nothing more—not yet.” His clear, blue eyes were on her pastel-like face. Then he added ponderingly: “But we may be cousins, after all. It wouldn’t make any difference—in the end. You understand?”

She showed how fully she understood by the quick wave of color on her cheek.

“My mother’s name was Lilith,” he went on.

“The name of my little sister who died.”

“My mother had a brother who ran away—some boy’s scrape at home. He was never heard of afterward. His name was John.”

“My father’s name.” She became suddenly confidential. “He was a contractor; plenty of money while he lived. We had a house a little way out of London. He drove to his office every day. Two servants, a governess for me, a dinner party now and then. When I grew up, a little shopping, a little housework in an elegant way—arranging flowers, setting the maids by the ears. You know. Thousands of girls live like that and are bored to death. He died bankrupt; mother died of a broken heart, or broken fortunes, poor dear. I was thrown on the world—the creditors took everything. That is five years ago.”

He had been listening attentively, watching every shade and shine upon her face, admiring her vivacious, half tragic gestures—not understanding her in the least. The genteel life she so scornfully sketched was unknown to him.

“You were the only one?”

“What?”

She lifted her head, rearing it almost, like an aggressive serpent.

“You were my Uncle John’s only child?”

“No.” The word came full and rounded from her mouth, and the eyes behind the curtaining lashes were somber. “There was a—a brother. He has gone away, a long voyage. He has a passion for the sea.”

“That settles it. Another brother of my mother’s, Uncle Thomas, was a captain in the navy. He ran away before he was sixteen; nothing would stop him. Every Crisp has a salt drop in his veins.”

“Father, in his most prosperous days, had a little yacht.”

“There you are again! The Crisp love for water. Well! I believe from my heart that we really are cousins—Cousin Pamela. I shall tell the folk hereabout that I advertised for my kin—Uncle John or his children—and that you, seeing the advertisement, answered. That will make things easy for us both. And now, cousin”—his voice was meaning, and his handsome open face became roguish and bold—“I ought to kiss you.”

She slipped her wrist from his finger and thumb and fell back.

She looked at his face—handsome, thin, almost ascetic if it had not been for the tan—with distaste.

“A kiss!” she murmured, with a quick, startled breath. “No, no; I couldn’t dream of it.”

He seemed pleased at what he assumed to be her modesty. There was a quaint pause, during which he thoughtfully examined her face, picking feature from feature and dwelling most on the downcast lids. Then he said, almost tenderly:

“What have you been doing these five years for a living? Cousin Pamela! if only I had known that Uncle John’s child——”

“Don’t talk like that. We are not sure. What did I do?” She gave a short, rather grating laugh. “Anything—short of scrubbing floors. I’ve been a governess. I’ve tried to draw fashion-plates—but my drawing was against me there. I’ve collected money for charitable institutions—on commission. I was a companion. She was a publican’s widow with heaps of money—one dare not be too particular. She was queer—a secret drinker I always thought. I had twenty-five pounds a year. She liked me so much that she raised my money at one bound to forty; money was only dirt to her. Forty pounds a year—and she died before the first quarter was due. I have always been unlucky.”

“And then?”

She shrugged with an artificial callousness.

“Looking out. Answering advertisements—until I answered yours.”

Directly she mentioned his the shame and outraged modesty in her surged up again.

“I’ve never answered an advertisement like that before,” she burst out. “But—it was fun, as you say. And I had put three advertisements in a paper for a situation—at three-and-sixpence for forty words. Three three-and-sixpences! Not a single answer! Something made me look at the Liddleshorn Herald. It was in the stationer’s shop—ordered specially for some customer. When I was a little thing I seem to remember that paper about at home. The name, Liddleshorn, was familiar. Something made me touch it, look down the advertisements. Then! You know!”

She put out her hands with a dramatic gesture. Jethro appeared to think that it was time he made his explanations of the situation.

“I did it for fun—at first,” he said. “Afterward I was rather taken with the idea. But not with the girls,” seeing her glance vindictively at the scattered letters. “I wanted to marry; Gainah’s getting too tight a hold on the place. And there is no one to entertain lady visitors—no mistress. It isn’t natural. I wanted a wife. I advertised for one. I wanted a change, too—a change of blood. It’s good for stock, why not for us? That’s the way I argued it out with myself.”

Her chin was sunk in the puffs of her white muslin blouse and the color was in her cheeks again. But he went on, apparently not noticing her confusion.

“For generations back every Jayne has married in the neighborhood. We are all related in some way; you meet the Jayne nose on a Crisp face—you have the Crisp chin—and a Furlonger little finger,” he crooked out his own, “on a Jayne hand. Nancy Turle has my father’s waving red hair, and I’ve got the Turles’ white skin.”

He tucked up the sleeve of his coat to show her his smooth, milky skin.

“I thought,” he continued, as she neither looked nor spoke, “that a change would be good. Change! You see it in stock; you see it in flowers. Those crimson phloxes,” he pointed through the window, “are twice as high this year because last autumn they were shifted in the border. And Gainah, who knows all about flowers, says she can’t grow heartsease three years running without lifting. They dwindle to farthing-faces. Even cabbage mustn’t follow cabbage. I said to myself that I’d graft new blood on the old Jayne stock.”

Pamela lifted her flaming face, and, putting out her thin foot, contemptuously kicked the nearest letter.

“Then you had better take one of these,” she said, with temper, “if, as you seem to think, I am a Crisp and your cousin.”

He looked at the foot which darted from her skirt.

“It’s a Furlonger foot,” he said simply. “Cousins! There isn’t a doubt. But I’m content to take the way of my fathers.”

“I—I don’t know. It is early. You’d better let me go back.”

As she spoke she fleetly shut her eyes, so that she could see neither the golden wheat-field nor the handsome face. At once the steep wall of the prison ran up, and above it, searing her eyes, was the blinding dome of sky. Beyond she saw the railway line, the dreary waste land, a solitary old cottage, a tethered goat; on the edge of the earth, meeting the sky, the bristling chimneys of the distant suburb beyond the Scrubbs.

The prison! That chapter of her life was nearly ended. She knew that she was weak; knew that she would yield to Jethro. Already she almost felt as if that golden field of wheat half belonged to her. She would yield. Why not? It was so simple, so idle. How she had longed for rest, and more—for freedom! The heel of another woman had been very hard on her neck. Just to go back to London, pack her boxes, take a cab, bid her landlady farewell—and leave no trace. When he came out from prison he would not find her—that was all.

“I might stay—and see,” she said faintly, opening her gray eyes.

“Very well. You want a situation; I offer you one. I pay you thirty-five pounds a year for gowns and things. That between ourselves. At the end of the year—we’ll see. To the world, to Gainah, you are my Cousin Pamela.”

“I’d like to earn my thirty-five pounds,” she said sturdily.

“Of course. You’ll make the place pretty, as young women can. You’ll entertain all your distant relations—the Turles and Crisps and Furlongers. You can write letters for me until I get about again. I’m like a log just now. Look here!” He rolled down the covering and showed his bandaged limb. “I got a fork run into my leg in the harvest field, and it turned to a nasty wound. But I shall be about again soon.”

“That is all?” She breathed relief, and the glint of distaste in her eyes faded out.

“That is all. You didn’t think I was a cripple?”

“I didn’t know.”

“You really do favor my Uncle John,” Jethro said, after a pause. “Do you mind—it will be your first duty—getting a leather case from that top, left-hand drawer? Yes, that’s it,” when she brought it back. “See! Here he is. Now, isn’t the mouth the same?”

He held before her the faded likeness, taken on silver, of a young man in staid black clothes, and with straggling side whiskers.

“Taken just before he ran away. Is it anything like your father?”

She stared at the dim old portrait for a long time before she answered. Her eyes took in every detail—the doubled fist on a bulky book, the vapid smile, the too apparent watch-chain with its bunch of seals.

“I can’t say,” she returned faintly at last. “This is a young man. Father was gray when I remember him. He married late in life. He had a white beard. But I think,” she held the portrait thoughtfully sideways, “that the mouth is something like. Father had a bare lip to the end of his days.”

She shut the case and laid it on the table. Another bee came in and darted at the nodding cherries in her hat. The metallic clink from the smithy became more persistent. Jethro said gently at last, putting out the big brown hand which was so dry and yielding:

“Then it is settled?”

Pamela, her head down, the long, haggard line deep on her lips, said almost inaudibly:

“Yes.”

The word had hardly died away before Gainah, in her dim blue cotton gown with the skimped skirt and straight bodice, put her head in at the door and asked harshly if the newly-found cousin meant to stay to dinner.

[CHAPTER III.]

HER past was tightly packed away behind her—packed as remorselessly, as perfectly, as she had corded her boxes; with much effort and expenditure of strength, but with a perfect regard to safety. She was out of London. Never again would she let her eyes of anguish light on the prison.

She was driving with Jasper along the dusty Sussex road, which barely a week before she had trudged wearily and with many misgivings. The prosperity and ease and promise of her new life struck at her, soothed her, with many minute details—the soft carriage-rug, the sleek coat of the mare, the polished harness. She had a passion for ease, for pretty things, for worldly status.

Folly Corner became her home—her sheltered home. Time passed. As the weeks wore on her face grew mobile and careless, dull pink begun to timidly bloom on her skin, her eyes brightened. She was happy, occupied, free from anxiety. Above all, she had plenty of pence, need never deny herself a penny pleasure—and she was one of those mercurial women who can be made happy by a bar of French chocolate, and miserable by a shabby hat. Once she said, with a bitter-sweet laugh, to Jethro:

“I was never made for responsibility. I ought to live in a harem. A bon-bon, a pat on the head from my master, would make me absolutely content.”

He seemed amused at first, then he looked puzzled, and then displeased. He had decided already in his serious, practical way, that she was to be his wife, and whimsicality struck him as unorthodox—nearly as bad as dissent. The Jaynes had always been stanch churchmen, and never spoke without first weighing every word.

Sometimes, in spite of herself, she gave a backward thought. Sometimes the hunted, tragic gleam lighted its taper in her happy eyes. Some shadow of the old grief, some touch of the old delirious joy and misery, stirred her. Rain against the window, a rumble of thunder, a shrieking wind, or a harsh voice was enough to frighten her. She felt a gnawing uncertainty. Would this peace, this ease, continue?

When these uncomfortable thoughts assailed her she plunged fiercely into work, clicking her needle and thimble through new calico, or darting about the rambling house with a duster. She was pathetically anxious to earn her salary, to be absolutely independent of Jethro’s charity. She had not yet decided whether her torn heart would allow her to marry him when the time came.

One morning he strolled down the weedy gravel path of the oblong kitchen-garden, with the holly hedge as wall on all four sides, and the holly arch as postern at the entrance. There were grass paths between the beds: they wanted mowing and leveling. The wide herbaceous borders were full of weeds. The gravel path going straight from one end to the other was a harmony in green and yellow.

There was a gardener at Folly Corner, but Gainah made him clean boots, chop wood, and carry buckets; while Jethro made him drive and groom the horses, and pressed him into service when he was short of hands on the farm. Consequently the garden was unattended. Scarlet pimpernel was vivid on the dry ground, bindweed bound round the cabbage-stalks, and wild clumps of blazing corn marigold bloomed unheeded.

Pamela was loitering in an archway of dead scarlet-runners, collecting seed, by Gainah’s orders. Gainah was mistress of the garden. Jethro came along the alley in his thick brown boots. His hands were in his breeches pockets; a Michaelmas daisy, which he had pulled from the border as he strolled, was in his mouth. He looked at Pamela, half tenderly, half quizzically—a look which always set her pulses throbbing. She could never forget, when she was alone with him, the piquant circumstances which had brought her under his roof. Sometimes when Gainah imposed distasteful tasks her neck would swell, and she told herself proudly that by next autumn she could, if she chose, be mistress of Folly Corner.

Her basket was three parts full of seed-pods—like the fingers of dainty gloves stretched over bones. As she moved the seeds made a dice-like rattle. Jethro took the basket from her and begun to pull the pods off the dry yellow stalks himself.

“You shouldn’t be at this work,” he said, lifting her white hand with his free one. “Why can’t Daborn do it?”

“Gainah likes to see to these things herself.”

“You must be mistress over Gainah.”

“Not yet,” she broke out involuntarily, and then flushed.

Jethro laughed.

“I’m glad you put it that way. Evidently we are of the same mind. Suppose we say six months instead of a year, Cousin Pamela.”

“No, no! A year, as we decided.”

She looked vaguely through the wasted tendrils of the dead beans as they clung to the sticks—looked in the direction of London. Jethro had once said carelessly London was that way, jerking his broad brown thumb widely. After that, she looked across the common whenever that chill thought of the prison stole in and numbed her brain.

“Come a little way along the road. If Gainah sees us she’ll call you in,” he said almost pleadingly. “I never get you to myself.”

He pulled out his turnip-like silver watch, which had been his grandfather’s, and added that he had ten minutes. Daborn was grooming the roan mare, ready to drive him in the dogcart to Liddleshorn.

“You might come too,” he said.

“No. Gainah would be angry.”

“You mustn’t think too much of her. After all, she’s a paid servant.”

“So am I.”

Her face, under the brim of her Panama hat, was arch and mournful at the same moment.

They went along the gravel path. Jethro took out his pocket-knife and cut off the head of a great plantain.

“The place wants seeing to,” he said with dissatisfaction, looking at the weeds in the bed. “It wants a mistress. You should see the garden at Turle House. Nancy manages that. Nancy in some sort of way must be your cousin. We are all relations.”

It was the last day of September, and there had been a frost early in the morning. The blackened marrow plants straggled on their mound. Daborn had clamped the beet the day before, and the broken leaves, with their wine-colored stems, were scattered. The plumy foliage of the carrots had died down. The sparkling parsnip leaves were yellow, and dew glittered on the crinkled, bluish leaves of the savoys with their tight hearts. The sun shone brightly, but the air was crisp. Everything was ominous of winter. Pamela shivered as she looked at the solid chimney stacks of Folly Corner, and pictured an iron winter in the fastness of that old house, with Gainah as grim companion.

They went through the yard into the road. Daborn had the dogcart out. Pamela stopped by the wall of the granary, her foot twined in a bit of trailing periwinkle.

“Give me the basket,” she said, “and good-by.”

Jethro looked at her.

“You’d better come too,” he said. “Jump in.”

“No. My dress; no gloves.”

“Tuck your hands under the rug. At Liddleshorn we’ll buy gloves. Jump up. We shan’t want you, Daborn. Here’s the basket. Miss Crisp will hold the reins.”

Pamela still hesitated, looking back at the house, and remembering she had promised Gainah that she would mark some pillow-slips. But it was such a magic morning, with an intensely blue sky—a March sky almost, with a spice of frost lurking behind the hot sun. There were long trails of red bryony berries on the hedges; glittering gossamer webs were woven across the clumps of broom on the common. Jethro looked so strong and masterful—such a man! She believed that in the end she would marry him whether she wanted to or not. He had a rough manner of command with women—savage, yet tender. Pamela, like a woman, loved it. She lifted her foot, swung up to the blue cushion, and a moment later they were bowling smoothly along the road.

He didn’t speak. He flicked at the mare with a tinge of pettishness. Pamela sat well back. She felt a person of some importance; every small girl they met bobbed her little skirts into the dust, and the heavy-footed laboring men lifted a finger to their hair as Jethro bowled by in the flashing sunshine.

He pulled up at the gate of a small farm, and asked Pamela to hold the mare while he went in. The farmer had a farrowing sow for sale.

She just clasped the slack reins. The farmhouse was so overgrown with fruit-trees and ivy that the mellow bricks were shrouded. By and by Jethro came swinging down the path, with a weak old man hobbling behind him. They went and leaned over the piggeries, which were on the left of the gate. She caught a word or two here and there; it was Greek to her. Jethro surveyed the huge black sow keenly before he closed the bargain. Then he swung open the gate in his familiar impetuous way, and just before he got up into the cart he turned to the old man and said with a kind of careless authority:

“You ought to get out of this. Sell up and go into lodgings. It isn’t good for a man to live alone.”

To Pamela he added in a bluff aside:

“Mansell has lost his missus.”

She leaned toward the straggling, shambling figure, and threw a faint smile of sympathy. He was a foolish-looking old man, with a face made more imbecile by a loose, slobbering lip and the short silvery spikes of a week-old beard. He began to pour out his misery and loneliness, perhaps because she, like his dead wife, was a woman.

“Missis died six months ago,” he said tremulously, as he twisted his dirty hands and gave his watery smile. “She was a good missis. But,” with a crowing cackle of laughter, “I was good, too. I never knocked her down, nor give her a black eye. I didn’t offen even scold her. Step inside.” His face and voice were eager. “I’d like you to have a look round.”

Pamela, oddly touched, said gently to Jethro:

“Let me go. You come too.”

They tied the mare to the gatepost, and went up the path to the brooding house in its tangle of ivy and its unpruned jungle of ancient plum-trees. The widower went first, chattering volubly all the time, his back bent, his hand heavy on the polished knob of his stick.

They went into the low-pitched living-room. The fusty smell turned Pamela faint. The old man seemed to divine her nausea.

“You should ha’ seen how missis kept it,” he said deprecatingly. “But, Lord bless you, I am a helpless old man, seventy-nine come October, and I can’t clean. I’m alone. Missis and the children dead. But I aint afraid.” He gave an apprehensive glance at the shadows of the murky room. “Why should I be? What I always says is this”—he kept peppering his platitudes with the silly laugh that went to the girl’s heart—“God, who made me, aint a-goin’ to kill me.”

Pamela looked round the room. Everything, inside and out of the farm, had gone to pieces for the lack of a capable woman.

“I did used to keep the garden terrible nice,” the old man said, seeing her gray eyes look through the door into the sunny wilderness. “But there! missis is gone! I’ll show you her earrings.”

He hobbled away into the adjoining room. Pamela heard him jingling metal and scrooping wooden furniture over the flag floor. Presently he came out with a card-board box shaking in his hand. He took the lid off reverently and held out the open box. A pair of earrings, of very pale gold, such as you can buy at fairs for a trifle, were on a bed of tissue paper.

“Very pretty,” the girl said lamely.

Jethro had gone outside. He was viewing the neglected fruit-trees severely.

“And there’s one more thing I must show you.”

Mansell hobbled away, up the crazy stairs this time, and came back with a snow-white smock, which he thrust into her hands.

“Missis made this for me to be married in.” He stuck his foolish red face forward and grinned more widely. “She put her best work into it. Lord bless you, when I was but a boy—I’m seventy-nine come October—we used to go to church on Sundays, every man in his clean smock. Missis did it. She was a rare one at her needle.”

Pamela looked at the exquisite, delicate stitching. The whole heart of that dead woman was woven into the diamonds and honeycombs and lattices of the wedding smock.

“Very pretty,” she said lamely again.

“I must get to Liddleshorn before ten,” Jethro cried out from the garden.

She stepped into the sun, Mansell behind her. He followed them to the gate, seeming pathetically anxious to hold on to human companionship as long as he could. A sheep-dog came running out from the barn. Pamela, who was distrustful of dogs, felt glad that she was in the cart.

“He won’t bite, bless you; he’s too old. But when he was young he was s’ savage. Missis used to set one side of the fire winter nights, and I used to set the other. And she, just for fun, used to say to me, ‘Oh, dear,’ and I used to say, ‘Oh, dear.’ You should have heard him growl. He was s’ savage you durstn’t move or speak.”

Jethro gathered the reins with an air of business.

“You must get out of this,” he advised, with curt good nature.

“I suppose I must. Yet I’d like to stop on. Yet since missis died everything’s gone to pieces. I used to get such good living—fresh butter and new-laid eggs. I can churn myself, but no one seems to care for my butter. Don’t know why; there was a great call for missis’s.”

“Well, good-by to you,” said Jethro, with masculine intolerance of his whimpering garrulity.

“Good-by and God bless you. Take care of yourselves. Come and see me again.” His bleared blue eyes were turned pleadingly on Pamela. “And, Master Jayne”—he looked from one to the other, and his shrill voice quavered childishly—“when you gets a missis may you never lose her. A man’s no good without a missis.”

The cart moved on. Presently Pamela said softly, “Poor old thing! he made me feel quite miserable.”

“He’s not quite right in his head. But—you heard what he said, Cousin Pamela? A man’s no good without a missis.”

The strong brown hand in the worn driving-glove plunged under the holland carriage-rug and took her bare fingers significantly.

“It’s true enough,” Jethro said thoughtfully, after a bit. “I’m worried about Folly Corner. Something’s wanting. The food’s all right——”

“Now, the food isn’t right,” she put in briskly. “Plenty of it—yes. But the serving! Who ever heard of a meat pudding brought to table in its basin! Fancy cheese on the breakfast-table! White sugar should be grated over the tarts and—oh, many things. Some of them I couldn’t mention to you: it wouldn’t be nice.”

She was thinking of a thrifty trick of Gainah’s: the unhatched eggs found in a hen that had been killed were used for cakes. She thought it perfectly horrid, and her town squeamishness made her feel that there was a certain indelicacy involved in the proceeding. At all events she couldn’t mention such a thing to Jethro.

“And the other day,” she continued, broodingly, “a pig was killed. Gainah was in the kitchen all day. She made me go out, too. The things they did with that pig! The savory horrors she turned out!”

Jethro gave a great jolly laugh.

“Chitterling and fagots and scraps,” he cried. “I like them. You are not a farmer’s wife—yet. Gainah is a splendid housekeeper. It isn’t the housekeeping. It is the—the—difference. You know what I mean. Flowers in the vases; the dinner-table dainty, not solid. Foolish things—but they make a difference.”

“They are important things. They certainly make a difference—all the difference. You’ve been dominated too long by that old woman. The place has the wrong tone. Do you understand what I mean? It looks a farmer’s house. It ought to look a gentleman’s.”

“But I am a farmer—and proud of it.”

“Of course. It is the fashion to farm nowadays. It is quite genteel if—if you lose money over it.”

He seemed puzzled at her pert extravagance, and said stolidly that he was glad that his farming paid—every Jayne was a good farmer; it was in the blood.

“Well,” said Pamela, with a shrug and a droll smile, “you can get the effect anyhow. We must put up with prosperity. There are many things I’ll do, if you’ll let me. The housemaid must wear a cap with lappets in the afternoons. She should wait at table, and bring your newspaper in on a tray; letters, too, when there are any. I’ll train her. Of course, Gainah does not know how; she will be grateful to me for hints. You are very slow down here in Sussex. Did I tell you that I lived for six months in a boarding-house?” There was the faintest quiver of her heavy lids. “I carved and kept accounts. Things were done very well there. I have moved about the world and kept my eyes open.”

While she was making this smug little speech Jethro looked at her with satisfaction. She was a woman of wit, of knowledge. Her glib tongue was refreshing and piquant after the demure monosyllables and faint opinions—always watered by Mamma—of the Liddleshorn damsels.

They were smoothly clattering down the High Street.

“Furniture.” Pamela pointed to the upholsterer’s. “There should be oak in the dining-room.”

“There is oak at Folly Corner.”

“Is that oak?” She opened her big eyes and arched her faint dun brows. “Then it is different. We had a beautiful carved dinner-wagon at the boarding-house.”

“It was my father’s grandfather’s furniture, and his grandfather’s before him,” Jethro said conservatively.

Pamela ran on:

“And cushions. There should be lots of cushions with frills.” She threw a longing glance at the draper’s.

Jethro looked too. One window was full of down cushions—big, square, and with frills deeper than the cushions themselves.

“They would look lovely on the settle,” Pamela said gloatingly.

Every woman has her pet weakness. Hers had always been carte blanche at the Oriental shop. There was a spatter of Oriental fripperies in a side window at the Liddleshorn draper’s; it was an up-to-date shop.

“And embroidered mats,” she added, “and big bowls to stand flower-pots in; and those green specimen glasses for the table; and a bit or two of that Benares brass; and—it’s really a very good assortment—one of those guitars to hang on the wall with ribbons. You should have fretwork ornaments and some lacquered brackets, on which to stand plates or little blue tear-bottles.”

Jethro beckoned to a small boy on the curb, and threw him the reins.

“We’ll go in,” he said, jumping down and holding out his hand to Pamela.

“I must get some gloves first of all,” she said, as her foot touched the pavement.

When she had bought them, she led Jethro captive through the Oriental department. He told her carelessly to buy what she chose, and she moved eagerly from one counter to another. She chose some gaudy rugs to toss about the oak floors. She bought brass bowls and trays, a few grotesque ornaments for the shelves, mats, a guitar, a Chinese woman’s shoe, a mandarin’s petticoat to throw over an armchair, a bundle of peacock’s feathers, a few bits of coarsely-printed china, various embroidered table-covers—all the vividly-colored, alluring rubbish that she fancied.

They had it packed up and stowed in the dogcart. She carried the china gingerly on her knee for fear of breakage. Her eyes danced. After years of poverty, this careless throwing away of money was delightful.

When they reached home she made Daborn take everything out and carry it into the dining-room—the dining-parlor, as Gainah persisted in calling it. There was a strong smell of raw onion from the kitchen; it was being packed away in wide-mouthed bottles, with alternate slices of beet and a savory bath of spiced vinegar. Gainah came in, her hands dyed with onion juice.

Pamela was excitedly unswathing her treasures from yards of tissue paper.

“We’ve bought a few things,” she said pleasantly. “Sit down and look at them. That is an Indian god.” She held out an abominable brown figure. “Jethro was saying that the place wanted improving—bringing up to date. Of course, you never hear of the newest things down here. How should you? I got these cushions for the settle, and this—isn’t the embroidery lovely?—for the piano. A piano should never have its back against the wall. It is an ugly piece of furniture; its form is all against it. I told Jethro that there should have been a grand in that big room. That is the only endurable form of piano.”

She was chattering the artistic jargon of a belated æsthete who had boarded at the house in Bloomsbury. Gainah hardly seemed to hear her. She had toppled down into one of the high-backed, rush-seated chairs, and was nervously moving her stained hands on her lap.

“Don’t you like these rugs?” Pamela cut the string with one of the heavy buck-handled knives which was on the dinner-table. “They are to be thrown down in odd corners—anywhere. You can’t have too much color in a room. I must go and take my hat off.” She glanced at the waiting dinner-table and stacked her purchases carefully on the horsehair sofa. “I’ll arrange everything this afternoon. By tea-time you will hardly recognize the place. Cousin Jethro is so kind; he says that if I haven’t thought of everything he will drive me into Liddleshorn again to-morrow. These green glasses are for flowers. I must arrange them every day for dinner in schemes of color. There! That is one thing I forgot—an embroidered centerpiece. And we might have candle-shades, too. Those candlesticks,” she glanced at some heavy ones of Sheffield plate on the oak sideboard, “are the rage in London just now.”

She ran out of the room. Gainah did not stir from her chair by the yawning hearth on which the first fire of the season smoldered. She gazed fixedly in her vacant way at the trash on the sofa. Only one thing that Pamela had said worked in her slow brain: “Jethro was saying that the place wanted improving.”

She looked at the gaudy plates and jars; then thought of the delicate family china which was locked away in the little closet leading out of the keeping-room. She looked at the red and yellow brackets, the ornaments, and then looked round at the distempered walls, against which stood the beautiful golden oak, every piece of which she had tended as if it were a child. Every week she had rubbed that oak with beeswax and turpentine. Every week she had washed the china bowls and figures on the shelf. Every week for more than thirty years! She knew now that the landmarks of those years were going to be swept away. Her face grew harsh and vindictive—the face of a worn old panther—worn, old, feeble, but still with claws. Pamela, who meant everything in the kindest spirit possible, and who never doubted that her efforts would be received with gratitude, was breeding tragedy. Gainah, in the upright chair, her mournful eyes roving sluggishly round the ancestral furniture that she loved, was working up to a climax.

Why should this girl—this pert jade, this strange cousin on the mother’s side—ruin the lives of her elders? Why should she sneer at rustic customs which were old enough to be as sacred as the Bible?

Gainah’s mental attitude changed from injury to rebellion. She began to ask herself stupidly, with an agonized questioning of her slow brain, if Pamela could not be got rid of, banished from Folly Corner. How should she lift from the farm the shadow thrown across it? She only wanted to serve her master in her old faithful way, according to her own lights. She had brought him up from his birth. She almost believed that she was his mother. She had even chosen his wife for him. Nancy Turle wouldn’t have taken the housekeeping keys. She clutched at them as they weighed down her apron pocket. Pamela should never take them either. Nancy Turle would never have spent money like water at Liddleshorn. She glowered at the brightly colored stuffs and crockery.

Only to go on serving him until the end. Wasn’t that a simple thing to ask? Just to be allowed to save and screw, to manage the farmhouse and to manage him in her hectoring way, which was all tenderness and devotion at bottom. She got up, turned her back on the new purchases, and ran her hand along the heavy sideboard lovingly, as if it were alive.

[CHAPTER IV.]

WHEN the purchases from the Oriental department were finally arranged, Pamela retreated to the door of the keeping-room—the drawing-room as she had privately determined to call it—and shut her eyes; then, opening them quickly and glancing comprehensively round, she tried to imagine what the effect of the room would be on a stranger. The round walnut table was pushed into a corner and covered with a red and yellow cloth, on which storks were painted. The piano cut across a corner, and had its back draped. The brackets were fixed on the wall and upheld Kaga plates. The mandarin’s petticoat, that had cost a great deal, nearly covered the green chair, and the green sofa was piled with cushions. The gaudy rugs did their best to cover up the bunches of pink Provence roses on the carpet.

Things really made a very good show. The place looked almost civilized. These were her complacent thoughts as she stood at the door with her head on one side. Instinctively she went upstairs and put on her best gown, and arranged her hair in the elaborate way which she reserved for special occasions. When she came downstairs she shut her eyes again, then opened them spasmodically. Yes, it would do.

She felt quite excited. Anyone could see that the hand of a person of taste had touched everything.

A feeling of towns came over her. She looked through the diamond panes of the long window as if she expected to see hansoms bowling along the road. Then she sighed and glanced in the mirror again. What was the good of dressing one’s hair and wearing one’s best gown? Nobody would call.

Gainah was still in the kitchen. She could hear her grating voice and slow step. Jethro was tramping over the stubble, his Irish terrier, Rob, at his heels. She put her softly-puffed head out of the bay window and called out pleadingly:

“Oh! do come in and look.”

He came across the field—came tolerantly, leisurely, as if he were good-humoredly indulging the whim of a child. When he opened the door he seemed too heavy for the transformed room, with its elegant tags of foreign frippery. He seemed to put it to shame; he brought an intangible, sterling feeling with him. Pamela, without knowing why, felt a little less satisfied.

“Do you like it?” she asked nervously.

He dropped into the green chair, his broad hands gripped round the petticoat, and looked about him with amusement.

“Everything’s crooked,” he said lazily, at last, his mouth drolly curved and his eyes merry. They were such keen, outdoor eyes; they seemed to pierce through shams. She was afraid that he saw the pins in the piano back. She had been obliged to join two lengths of silk together, and had been too eager to stay and sew it.

“Yes, everything is crooked; that is one of the fundamental rules of modern decoration,” she told him flippantly. “Piano across one corner, table across the other; nothing stiff, nothing solid.”

“Umph!”

He was not impressed. He was certainly laughing at the single knickerbocker of silk into which she had stuck a pot of late musk.

“You’ve blocked the door of the china closet with that jar of feathers.”

“The china closet! How delightful. It never occurred to me to ask what was beyond that door.” She tried the handle, then asked him for the key.

“Gainah has it.”

“I’ll get her to give it me.”

She dashed out into the corridor and met the housekeeper midway.

“I was coming to look for you,” she said, with her unfailing good temper and self-satisfaction. “I want your opinion on the drawing-room. There! Isn’t that pretty? Cousin Jethro doesn’t care a bit; but, then, men are no good at decoration.

“And I want you to give me the key of the china closet,” she added.

A queer flush stole over Gainah’s cheeks, and her distorted hand went involuntarily to her apron pocket, and her cold eyes sought Jethro’s beseechingly. Pamela had her palm outspread.

“Yes, we’ll have a look in the closet,” Jethro said easily. “Don’t know when I went in last. There is a lot of stuff that was my mother’s and your aunt’s.” As he put in this touch, he glanced meaningly at Gainah, with the half-timid assertion of a big, kindly man who has been subjugated by a mean woman.

He wanted her to remember, without troubling him to hurt her by putting it into words, that Pamela was one of the family, and had a close interest in the family crockery.

“The closet is only opened once a year, when we clean in spring,” Gainah said grudgingly. “I don’t want strange fingers handling the china.”

But she opened the door. Pamela, quite as a matter of course, took the key off the ring and slipped it into her own pocket.

“It is a mistake to hide old china. The room won’t want locking again,” she said, gliding over the bare, dusty floor. “What a lovely collection! I wish I had known, then I need not have wasted money on Kaga. Anyone can buy that for so much three farthings—farthings play a most important part in modern decorations, Cousin Jethro.”

She dimpled round at his puzzled face, and threw a conciliatory glance at Gainah, who had taken up a canary-colored jug with uneven black lettering straggling round its bulging middle. They were all three in the tiny room, lighted by one high window, across which the foamy white rose crept.

“May I look?” Pamela took the canary jug.

“‘Long may we leve.

Happy may we be,

Blest with content,

And from misfortin’ free.’

“Most delightful sentiments, and equally delightful spelling,” she commented lightly, while Jethro watched her with a growing admiration, and the cold light slanted through the window on Gainah’s worn, malevolent face.

“What blue bowls and dishes! What luster! I think they call that coppery stuff luster.”

“My mother’s best tea set.” Jethro took up a tiny handleless cup with purplish-pink trails of flowers painted on it.

“Lowestoft, I think.” Pamela cocked her head on one side. “But I know nothing of china. Therefore I admire it all—that is a very safe rule in art. Now you and Gainah must run away.” She made a feint of pushing him toward the door. “I’m going to be busier than ever. All this must be arranged to the best advantage. Then the door will be left open, and when next we go to Liddleshorn you must buy a portière.”

She jumped upon a chair, and lifted bowls and dishes from the top shelf, making a running comment as she did so.

“I wish I knew printed from painted. This dish is either very valuable or utterly worthless; some things are just on the borderland. You two must really go away.” She put out one hand deprecatingly. “There ought to be some tin tacks, or a ledge, in front of the shelves, so that the plates could stand up.”

Gainah looked at her, a brilliant, dainty, voluble creature, high up on a mahogany chair whose back was carved in wheat-ears. She had all the color and pertness of a bullfinch. She looked at her, this dangerous republican; looked at white fingers carelessly handling china which for over thirty years only her own hands had touched. She had grown to believe that it was hers, that Jethro himself was hers, and the farm too, with its fat acres and its ripe family tradition. She had been undisputed queen at Folly Corner the best part of her life. All the family connections, when they paid Jethro a rare visit, had deferred to her. Yet not one of them knew the truth—that Jethro’s father had almost married her.

She thought of that as she watched Pamela standing radiant on the chair. A horrible pang for the muddles, incomplete past, and a still more set feeling of bitterest, merciless revenge contracted her heart. She turned away without a word, leaving the cousins in the china closet. She sat herself down in the ruins of her temple, and looked blankly at the devastation wrought by Pamela’s active fingers in two short hours.

She knew for whom this room had been refurnished more than thirty years before. Not for Jethro’s mother. She, after the fashion of frugal first wives, had saved and gone short of household elaborations. The room had been furnished for her. She, Gainah Toat, had been the elder Jethro’s second fancy. She had been a good-looking woman well within thirty in those days; while he had been nearer sixty, having married a middle-aged cousin—of the plain variety of women, warranted to wear well—when he was fifty or more. But she, Gainah, had inspired him with positive passion. Bah! She knew what a man’s passion was, and how far it led him. She knew that it made even a miser like the elder Jethro dip deeply into his pocket.

She remembered driving with him into Liddleshorn, just as Pamela had to-day driven in with his son, and choosing the flowery carpet, the round table, the piano—on which she could never hope to play a note. Neighbors had condoled with her on the prospect of a new wife at Folly Corner. She had said nothing, by his wish—he was a taciturn man. But she remembered the flutter of triumph which had worked behind her dry lips all the time. She knew that she was to be the bride of whom they gossiped and about whose appearance they speculated.

What might have been! He had been dead more than thirty years, and she had dutifully kept the secret of his weakness. Not even Jethro knew that there had been love passages, of a fairly practical sort—on one side at least—between Gainah and his father. Her courting scenes had been seasoned with matter-of-fact reference to the crops or the prospects of early ducklings. She had always been grim and unbending.

What might have been! If only the master of Folly Corner had not been pitched out of the high gig. His head had cracked on a heap of big stones by the road, piled high all ready for autumn breaking.

She remembered so well the day they brought him home. It was on a Monday, and she had, for once, managed to cut her nails without thinking of a fox’s tail—sure sign of a present.

That was the present they brought her—the dying body of the substantial man, who loved her in his common-sense way, who would have redeemed her from service.

She remembered the day of the funeral. It was a cold day. The bereft house had seemed to rock and moan with every wail of the agonized wind outside. The front door, through which they carried the long, wide coffin, was flung widely back by her orders until the burial service had been read at the church. If that had not been done there would have been another death within the year. Bitterly as she had been disappointed and foiled, she did not want to die. Neither did she want baby Jethro to die; she loved him a great deal better than she had loved his father—there was no ulterior motive mixed up with her regard for the child.

The farmer had not even made a will in her favor. He had not left her one penny. She stayed on as paid housekeeper, the conclave of relatives deciding that it would be best. Mrs. Turle, the dead man’s sister, paid her quarterly. She stayed on. She managed the farm until Jethro grew up. She managed Jethro—had never left off managing him. She was a masterful woman.

And now she was to be put aside, like the pair of china figures which had lost an arm apiece, and which stared at each other hopelessly on their dim attic shelf.

Jethro came out from the closet, looking handsome and happy. Pamela, still on the chair, was softly humming a gay little air.

Gainah struggled up from the sofa. She looked at Jethro. She moved her dry pale lips, and moved her oddly-dressed brown head too. She wanted to speak to him—to implore, to insist. But the words strangled in her throat at the sight of his exultant face and shining eyes.

It was useless for age to pit itself against youth. Her time was past. She knew, although it was gall to admit it, that the girl she hated had Nature on her side. All her comparisons were drawn from Nature; her untiring energy of pickle and preserve making had gone hand-in-hand with Nature.

Didn’t the old potatoes rot off to make room for the new? Wasn’t it natural?

Her feet moved slowly over the carpet. It had been her choice nearly thirty-five years before. But it was hardly worn; they rarely used the keeping-room.

She went into the garden. She looked at the brown stalks of the summer’s annuals in her borders. They were dead, dry—only fit for the waste-heap. Yet their young seedlings were green and vigorous. It was all so simple, so natural. Yet—yet! She was far too practical, too mentally sluggish, to put the half-formed thought into clear shape. They were only fit for the waste-heap—but did they want to go there? Wasn’t there some dumb, desperate struggle against extinction going on between those brown, sadly swaying stalks?

Then she saw a wagonette pull up at the white gate, saw a head of rich red hair between the poplars, and hurried indoors to put on her black silk gown.

[CHAPTER V.]

PAMELA saw the wagonette, too, as she perched on the chair, her head level with the high window. She was so surprised and fluttered that the Oriental bowl she was lifting down nearly dropped from her fingers. She called through the open door to Jethro:

“Here’s a carriage at the gate. Inside, an elderly lady and a girl with red hair. They are coming up the path.”

“Aunt Sophy—Mrs. Turle, of Turle House—and Nancy.”

“They have come to call on me.”

She gave a soft breath of satisfaction as she jumped from the chair; her best gown, her waved hair, were justified. She had only just time to add, “What a pity I hadn’t finished the china closet!” before they were announced, in rustic, familiar fashion, by the red-armed housemaid, who hadn’t yet changed her cotton gown for her afternoon stuff one.

Mrs. Turle was a big woman with a stately carriage. Nancy was slim, and either shy or stupid. She had a very white skin—the Turle skin, as Jethro had said. Whenever she spoke or was spoken to, a silly pink flooded her face. Her dress was precise and perfect in detail; the very best that the best shop in Liddleshorn could supply. Mrs. Turle, too, wore a stiff silk, and the set of golden sable which had been part of her wedding outfit, and was only just beginning to look damaged by moth. This was evidently a state call. Pamela saw her look swiftly round the room, as she threw back her net veil with the deep hem.

Jethro, after a few awkward words—he never excelled in the presence of women—went back to his stubble and his dog. Pamela was left alone with these two—evidently bent on criticism—who might or might not be of her blood. Mrs. Turle said, looking at her steadfastly:

“My dear, you are like Jethro’s mother. She died when he was born, you know. Always weak here.” She laid her plump hand on the sable that crossed her ample bosom. “I hope your chest is not weak. You don’t look very strong.”

“I am quite strong, thank you,” the new cousin returned rather awkwardly, conscious that Nancy was trying to puzzle out the construction of her coiffure.

“You may think so”—Mrs. Turle dealt out the sweet, maternal smile for which she was famous,—“but one can never be sure of one’s own constitution. I must send you down a large bottle of the cough syrup I make for Nancy every autumn.”

She kept looking round the room. Pamela felt sure that she resented everything—the tablecloth with storks, the winking brass bowls, the very petticoat, which her portly shoulders crushed.

“I should have called before,” she continued apologetically, “but I couldn’t have the horse. We only keep one since Mr. Turle died, and my man, Evergreen, like all old servants, must be indulged. He doesn’t care to drive in bad weather, and we have had so many mists lately. Besides”—there was a tinge of reproach in her purring voice—“I hadn’t seen you at church. I didn’t know if you were ready for callers.”

“Church! Oh, I haven’t been yet. It seemed such a pity to waste half a beautiful day indoors,” said Pamela innocently. She saw timid Nancy glance at her mother and smile. They were very tepid people. She already felt as if little cascades of lukewarm water played on her.

“In London,” she added, in extenuation, “so few people go to church.”

Mrs. Turle looked grave.

“I must say,” she said softly—and Pamela soon learnt that “I must say” was her favorite formula—“that people in towns are very lax. You can’t bring up a large family—I’ve had fifteen—without method. When my children were little they went to church twice on Sunday—what else could you do with boys? They would only loaf about. Next Sunday, dear, Nancy and I will call for you. We always drive.”

“Thank you very much.”

“And you have always lived in London? Your mother and father are dead, so Jethro told us. I knew your father. He was a very handsome young man. I must say,” her scintillating eyes were full on the girl’s face, “that I should never have known you for his daughter. There is no resemblance; poor John had such regular features.”

Pamela looked a little awkward. Nancy said kindly in her weak, sweet voice, and with her languishing smile:

“Do you ride a bicycle?”

“No. I—I’ve never had the chance.”

“Oh! you must get one. Mustn’t she, mamma? It is such fun. In the summer we have picnics, and in the winter paper chases.”

“That would be nice.”

The cascades of tepid water were growing in volume. She was new to this class of caller. Her London experience was pretty large; she had knocked about in her search for bread. She knew the art jargon of Hampstead, the conscientious struggle for intellect and high purpose which distinguishes the prosperous quarter of Bloomsbury. She could talk shops with a feather-headed woman, babies, even, with a bovine one, or the divine duties of sex with the serious. But with these people there was no give-and-take, no merry tossing with the ball, no brightening of the wits.

“And I suppose you were living with some other relations in London?”

“No,” she said curtly, “I was working for my living. Jethro is my only relation.”

“We are all kin, are we not, mamma?”

“Of course. So you had a career, dear? Yes. Art? So many girls go in for that. Nancy attended the Liddleshorn school for a time. But I don’t think the influence is good for a young woman. I must say that drawing from a model is not my idea of delicacy.”

“Never from the nude, mamma.”

“Oh! never from the nude, of course. Unless it was a foot. I think you drew from a foot once, Nancy, love.”

“Oh, yes, mamma; but the model only came once. She hadn’t understood that she must take her stockings off.”

Pamela was yawning. “I haven’t studied art,” she said curtly.

“Literature? A great many girls go in for that. We had an author at Mere Cottage. A most extraordinary person. He put a Latin text over his door. What was it, Nancy?”

“Parva domus magna quies, mamma.”

“Yes, something like that. I’m not quite sure that your Latin is right. But Egbert would know. He is my son at Cambridge.”

“The people were so puzzled,” said Nancy. “Old Mrs. Chalcraft declared it meant knock and ring. But one of the other old women said it was a spell to keep witches away.”

“It was a stupid thing to put,” Mrs. Turle broke in with impatience. “‘A little house for great quiet.’ That is how my son translated it—my youngest son at Cambridge. That is absurd, of course; little houses never are quiet.”

“But he meant, mamma, that he didn’t want people to call.”

“Then he need not have troubled to put such a sentence over his door, dear. Old Timms, who is a painter by trade, was half afraid to do it.”

“His wife made him give up the job when he got to magna, mamma. Some of the old people are so superstitious. She was afraid he might be signing some compact about his soul with the devil.”

Pamela laughed. The conversation was waking up, she thought, but Mrs. Turle looked grave.

“It was in very bad taste,” she said, “and he need not have troubled. No one meant to call on such people.”

“And was it literature, dear?” she continued, more genially. “We are quite literary down here.” She laughed pleasantly, as if introducing Pamela to a congenial atmosphere. “What is the name of that person at the new house on the Liddleshorn Road, Nancy? She keeps a poultry farm and takes in type-writing.”

“Samuels, mamma.”

“Yes, Mrs. Samuels. And there is Mrs. Clutton at the Buttery. Her husband is a journalist—so she says.”

The last three words were spoken impressively. Pamela immediately divined that Mrs. Clutton, of the Buttery, was not a local favorite.

“Nancy has a great taste for literature,” Mrs. Turle continued, with a fond glance at her daughter, who immediately blushed. “I think that if there had ever been any question of her going out into the world she would have chosen literature.”

“Only I can never think of a subject,” Nancy said pathetically. “If only I could think of a subject and get somebody else to begin!”

“We subscribe to Smith’s,” Mrs. Turle said, smiling sweetly. “We like to keep abreast with the times. Nancy goes in for serious subjects; she is halfway through Ruskin’s——”

“Huxley’s, mamma.”

“There is very little difference, dear. But I confine myself to current fiction. I’m just reading Kingsley’s ‘Westward Ho!’”

“I’m not at all literary,” said Pamela. “I was governess for a time. Then I was a companion. And—and I managed a boarding-house.”

“Really! Then you understand housekeeping. That will be a help to Gainah, who is growing old. Ah! here she is. I suppose you have made your elderberry wine, Gainah? I only got a cask and a half this year.”

Pamela opened her gray eyes when Mrs. Turle of Turle affectionately greeted the housekeeper. She was astounded to see Gainah, in her black silk, and with a worn gold chain round her scraggy neck, sit down with the easy air of an equal on the sofa. She couldn’t understand her position. She derided the idea of her importance—an ignorant old woman who was always cooking. Gainah in her eyes was a servant—nothing more. But in local opinion she was entitled to much deference. The laborers regarded her as even more important than “young Jethro,” who was only a stripling.

Nancy took Pamela’s hand.

“Come out in the garden,” she said. “I so love a garden. Do you?”

“I don’t know anything about it,” said Pamela, as they strolled about in the sun, and the other girl made little gurgling comments.

“How sweet those stocks are! What a show of asters! Ours were a failure. Evergreen doesn’t care for asters. He likes carpet-bedding and I bought him a half-crown packet of petunia seed; so I did hope he would succeed with the asters. You must get Jethro to build you a little greenhouse. I could give you plenty of geranium cuttings next spring. It is a little late to take them now. I think it is a little late; but I must ask Evergreen. You should have a bicycle.” She was evidently anxious to be friendly. “Would you like to join our Shakspere class? It is quite proper, you know.”

“Perhaps,” said Pamela vaguely.

Directly she heard the tea bell she hastened her steps almost rudely. She was determined that Gainah should not take the head of the table, and she managed to slip on to the oak stool behind the urn just as the two elder women came along the corridor.

Gainah sat down at the side, shaking her hands and vibrating her head with anger. But Mrs. Turle smiled approval.

“You must find a young lady in the house a great help,” she said innocently, as she sat down, spreading her thick silk skirt flat beneath her. “Nancy always pours out for me.”

Pamela was sulky. She hated what she called a “sit-down” tea. Tea was not a meal; it was an interlude, a good way of helping out an idle afternoon.

Jethro on the high stool at the end was hospitably carving a ham. The smiling housemaid kept coming with fresh plates of toasted tea-cake, preserve, or buns.

“You must give me the recipe for these rice cakes,” Mrs. Turle said.

“Two cups of rice flour,” returned Gainah solemnly.

“You beat your butter to a cream, of course?”

“Yes. Two eggs.”

“That is very economical. We have hardly any eggs. The hens are all getting broody again, and I must say an October brood is not worth hatching. I wish Evergreen would let me have a non-setting breed.”

“Nothing better than Leghorns,” said Jethro.

“Tch!” interrupted Gainah, with her air of absolutism, “Langshans are better.”

“But they are not nice table birds.” Mrs. Turle smiled on them both and took another cake. “Now, I must say I like the Plymouth Rock—only its legs are yellow.”

Pamela, with the superior air of a being on a higher plane, poured out her newly-found aunt a third cup of tea.

The talk went on. She heard Gainah and Mrs. Turle talk of wine-making, cider-making, apple-storing.

“Our Blenheims,” Gainah complained, “have all gone a-bitel.”

“They will go mildewed some years. I don’t know why,” returned Mrs. Turle sympathetically; “ours have kept beautifully so far. I’ll ask Evergreen if we can spare you some.”

It was a very long meal. The dying sun straggled round the house and filled the dull room with yellow light. Through the latticed window they could see the mist rising like a huge bridal wreath from the wet grass. Mrs. Turle got up hurriedly when the housemaid came in to say that her carriage had come round.

“You must spend a long afternoon with us soon,” she said, kissing Pamela. “What are we doing on Wednesday, Nancy?”

“It’s the Shakspere class, mamma.”

“Of course. Pamela must join the Shakspere class. Mrs. McAlpine, my dear, who started it, is extremely clever—she reads German novels in the original. And she is very particular—they only read the nice parts of the plays. I inquired into that when Nancy joined. For although one admires and loves dear Shakspere, I must say one is never sure of him. It seems such a pity. Are we free on Thursday, Nancy?”

“I usually go round with the Parish Magazines, mamma—it is the third Thursday in the month.”

“So it is. And Friday is unlucky. I don’t believe in such nonsense, of course, but it is as well not to run unnecessary risk. And Saturday, that is no day at all.”

“I usually give out stores on Saturday, mamma.”

“Then we’ll say Monday. No, Tuesday—that will give us time to make a cake. I must ask some more of your relations to meet you, dear. And, Nancy, we must be careful with the cake; Maria’s are always so excellent, and she is so critical. And now run out, dear, and tell Evergreen I’ll come in a moment. I’m afraid he won’t like being kept in the mist.”

On Tuesday Jethro, who was driving into Liddleshorn, dropped Pamela at Turle. She stood and watched him out of sight, admiring the smartly turned-out trap and his broad back in the light covert coat. Then she went, with lagging feet, up the drive.

Turle was an old house which had been improved into an appearance of juvenility. Mr. Turle bought it when he retired with a comfortable fortune from the milling—a comfortable fortune, and a determination on the part of his wife—to end his days as a gentleman. He spent so much money that people forgot that he had been a miller. When he died his widow was actually on the skirts of small gentrydom. She was a diplomatic woman, and managed to steer fairly clear of family connections who were still in superior family trade. She drove her social four-in-hand skillfully, and kept several distinct sets in perfect balance, smiling on them all with the same motherly, expansive sweetness, yet never offending the aristocratic susceptibilities of Mrs. Sugden, the Paper King’s wife, who called on her twice a year, nor hurting the feelings of the Jeremy Crisp girls, whose father still carried on the family grocer’s business in Liddleshorn.

Pamela liked Turle. The farm-buildings were hidden, the surrounding meadows had been knocked into a miniature park and planted with trees. They were young trees, but everything must have a beginning.

When she was announced she saw that the big drawing-room was full of strange women. She looked hurriedly from one face to another, finding family characteristics everywhere. Mrs. Turle kissed her.

“You don’t look quite up to the mark,” she said affectionately. “A touch of bile?”

She was introduced to all of them; handed over from one to another, like a bale of samples. They had been engrossed at her entrance over a big box of fancy work. One of the Jeremy Crisp girls—who was only a girl by courtesy—went into elderly raptures over a woolwork jacket, which looked a capital fit for an organ-grinder’s monkey, and was intended for a baby.

“The box comes round to us once a quarter,” Mrs. Turle explained. “It goes round to all members. Every member works something, prices it, puts it in the box, and sends it on to another member. If we see anything we like we buy it.”

Pamela was beginning to find out that her new cousins and aunts were tremendously busy women—over nothing at all; that they had a frenzy for belonging to classes and societies; that they took themselves and their efforts very seriously.

The cheerful coal fire winked on the foolish satisfied faces with their ridiculous monotony of outline and color. A crunching on the gravel made everybody glance out of the window. Mrs. Turle seemed a little frightened and annoyed. She looked deprecatingly at Cousin Maria Furlonger, from the “Warren,” who was so very exclusive, who moved in such a good set, and habitually went up to help Mrs. Sugden when she gave a charitable entertainment.

“It’s Mrs. Clutton, my dear. You didn’t want to meet her, did you?”

“Oh, never mind, Aunt Sophy. I needn’t know her if I meet her again.”

“I wish she wouldn’t drop in so unceremoniously,” poor Mrs. Turle said in a hurried whisper. “Mrs. Sugden was here the other day. She begged me to let her out of the back door because Mrs. Clutton was coming in at the front. Of course a woman in her position couldn’t possibly meet anybody like that.

“My dear,” she swept her ample skirts across the room, “this is a pleasure. Nancy and I were wondering what had happened to you. We’ve seen nothing of you for at least three days. You’re a little pale. The weather is trying, and makes one look so fagged and worn.”

It was a trick of Aunt Sophy’s to compassionate everyone and comment on the fragility of their appearance. Pamela, when she grew to know her better, was never sure whether it was a feline trick or a sympathetic one.

The new-comer was dark and lean. She was a young woman, whose face looked as if it had weathered storms. She was carelessly dressed in perfectly cut clothes, rather worn. She carried a damp, loosely-tied parcel, which she handed to Nancy.

“Here are your pinks and white phloxes. Put the roots in soon.”

“If Evergreen has time to-morrow——”

“Don’t wait for him; he’ll kill them. Gardeners have a knack of sticking their spades through the things they dislike. Do it yourself. I am so glad I can’t afford a gardener—to give me a plant for the table when he chooses.” Her eye fell on a melancholy petunia.

“Have you been to any more sales, dear?” asked Mrs. Turle. “Have you added to your interesting collection of nice old things?”

“Oh, yes!” Mrs. Clutton’s voice became enthusiastic. “I went to such a delightful sale at Carrsland. I bought a little oak table. A dealer ran it up to thirty shillings—the wretch! He passed me on the road! I was walking, as usual; he was cycling. I instantly smelt him out as a dealer, and I was half inclined to tip him off the bicycle with the point of my umbrella, gag him, bind him to a tree until the sale was over. I wish I had; it would have been so deliciously simple.”

There was an awkward silence; then Nancy said, in her gently gushing way:

“I wish you’d ride a bicycle. It’s such fun.”

Maria Furlonger, of the “Warren,” added politely:

“Yes. You should ride; it’s so good for the brain; and I’ve heard you write—or something of the sort.”

“Bicycling’s very bad for one’s logic; you can’t imagine a logician on a bicycle. I don’t write; my husband does.”

Mrs. Turle, anxious for perfect harmony, and knowing—also sharing—the local skepticism regarding Mrs. Clutton’s husband, put in blandly:

“Mr. Clutton is a journalist. He has gone for a tour round the world.”

“Oh!”

Maria Furlonger’s wide smile full in Mrs. Clutton’s face was a little dangerous.

Mrs. Turle added quite irrelevantly:

“Poor Mrs. Peter Hone has another baby. That’s twelve.”

“Sympathy is wasted on the poorer classes,” Mrs. Clutton put in, with her calm, dogmatic air. “You pet them too much. Once it was lap-dogs; now it’s paupers. Any old dame with a clean apron and a courtesy, any old man with his trousers tied round the calf and his chin like stubble, can take you in. Merely a question of livery! Now, it is the man in the top hat who wants petting—the man who is at his wits’ end to keep up his insurance payments.”

The tea bell rang. They all filed solemnly into the dining-room.

Maria Furlonger, who was rather taken with Pamela’s silence, which, of course, meant modesty, began to tell her graciously about the old Manor House at Carrsland, where her father, Jethro’s mother’s brother, had been born.

“It’s a very old place. There is a moat all round. It has been filled up.”

“I am so glad it has been filled,” cried another cousin. “It was so awkward, so dangerous. You see”—addressing herself to Pamela—“it was just under the drawing-room window, and a lady might so easily have fallen out. What a terrible thing it would be for a lady to fall out of her own drawing-room window—into a moat!”

“When ladies have a tendency that way they should sign the pledge,” said Mrs. Clutton tersely.

Nancy, meeting her mother’s diplomatic eye, rushed into the breach:

“Have you heard about the nice butcher boy?”

“That boy at Churnside’s?”

“Yes. He has stolen ten pounds. They have arrested him.”

“Dishonesty on a small scale never pays,” said Mrs. Clutton. “Honesty is really the best policy—now that we have such an excellent police force.”

She was putting on her gloves, and they looked at each other with secret satisfaction. She seemed anxious to go. She looked as if the double row of placid faces irritated her. Mrs. Turle and Nancy kissed her. The former said:

“Come in again soon; we see so little of you. And take a tonic, dear—you’re really looking run down.”

“What a vulgar person!” said Maria Furlonger, when the place was clear of her.

Annie Jayne—the Jaynes of the “Mount”—said:

“She struck me as being a little weak—mentally. Dear mother used to say that no properly-balanced woman should have opinions of her own—outside the domestic circle.”

“I must say that some of her remarks are in bad taste,” Mrs. Turle admitted gently. It was her policy to offend nobody, to speak ill of nobody; ill-natured remarks never helped your social ascent.

“She’s quite incorrigible,” one of the Jeremy Crisps said. “Do you know that she cut Mr. Meadows?”

“She didn’t!”

“She did!”

“The clergyman of the parish! A rural dean!”

“He called on her—merely a parochial call. He said that he liked to be identified with all his parishioners—whatever their views. Could anything be more broad, more generous?”

“Well?”

The Jeremy Crisp girl continued:

“She actually laughed in his face, and said she had not any views; didn’t he consider views narrow?”

“She’s not a lady.”

“That’s not all. He met her in the lane next day. He nodded most affably; you know his rule: a nod to people who walk, a bow to those who keep a carriage. It is a wise rule—it defines the classes so well, which is absolutely necessary, or where should we be?”

One or two superior cousins sneered at each other across the teacups. The airs of these Jeremy Crisps!

“She cut him dead!”

“I spoke to her about that,” Mrs. Turle said gently.

“Well! What did she say? Short sight? She wears glasses for effect, no doubt.”

“Those eye-glasses make one look so intelligent, they really do,” put in a quiet cousin, who had scarcely spoken all the afternoon; “I thought of getting some.”

“She said that the men of her acquaintance might touch their hats or raise them—which they choose. If none of us would put that insufferable Mr. Meadows in his place, she must.”

“You never should have called on her, Aunt Sophy.”

“My dear Maria, she is a neighbor. And you never know how these queer people from London may turn out. Sometimes they prove desirable. I hesitated a long time, though, when I heard her husband was a journalist: very often journalist means swindler.”

“She looks to me like a woman who drinks,” Maria Furlonger said. “Drink makes people talk at random; drink makes people forget their duty to their superiors in the parish.”

“Dear mother always said that a drunken woman was such a much more painful sight than a drunken man,” Annie Jayne said. “Oh! I can’t believe it of her, Maria. She was quite nice to Baby the other day.”

Annie had her first baby, and thought of very little else besides. If anyone admired Baby she concluded, in her simple, ardently maternal way, that such admiration was a moral certificate.

“Drink! Nonsense!” said Mrs. Turle, quite sharply for her. “I must say she has very clever ideas. She told me the other day that she was thinking of patenting an automatic arrangement for making cyclists swallow their own dust—though it would never do for you, Nancy, with your chest. Why, here is Jethro. I suppose he has come to take you away, Pamela?”

[CHAPTER VI.]

THE autumn rains set in early that year. Every night when Pamela fell asleep in her bedstead with the fluted posts and hangings of chintz, having a fearful pattern of black roses, she heard the murmuring rush of rain down the pipes and into the soft-water tubs. Every morning she was awakened by the swish of rain against the casement and the clatter of the maidservant’s clogs on the stones in the yard.

She spent long afternoons in the drawing-room staring dismally out at the sodden fields and the hills beyond, which shed sad mist. She was left very much to her own resources; her new relations rarely visited in bad weather.

She gave the house the benefit of her active brain, instituting all sorts of changes which she honestly believed to be reforms. She flung a modern, flimsy feeling of culture about the staid old place—a feeling expressed by current magazines, superficial opinions, shallow daring.

Jethro was pleased and invigorated by her reckless dogmatic opinions, by her dainty domestic ways. He used to watch her graceful figure flit from room to room, used to listen to her high young voice giving peremptory orders. She fascinated him. She was always changing, and the women to whom he had been accustomed all his life never changed. Each one said and did exactly what her mother had said and done before her: to be original was to break the fifth commandment.

They sat round the great open hearth on wet, wild evenings. Gainah would be sewing or painfully writing out recipes in a dirty copy-book. Pamela generally had a catalogue of bulbs, a sheet of paper, and a pencil. Nancy’s gushing, incapable enthusiasm, and Mrs. Clutton’s practical knowledge of flower gardening had infected her. She already knew them well enough for that. She was full of ideas for spring bedding.

“I must have a hundred early tulips,” she would say coaxingly.

When Jethro, looking up from the local paper, returned indulgently, “Order what you please,” she added the hundred tulips to her list with the glee of a child.

Gainah seldom said anything. She had always been a silent woman, and Pamela’s whirling, modern influence had petrified her altogether. The thin white lips hardly opened except to timidly rate the two maids, who now tossed their heads at their former tyrant. She took Pamela’s presence passively, never commenting on anything she did. But sometimes, when the girl looked up suddenly from the fascinating bulb catalogue, and found those odd eyes on her, she shivered. They were so dead—those eyes. Yet such a secret, such a terrible soul seemed to play and lurk behind them.

Gainah never protested. Little by little she felt the scepter slip from her powerless hand. Little by little her life lost color. Pamela laughed at her methods, was often disgusted by her thrifty, traditional economies. She had a superior trick of saying, “My way is the correct one.” Or she would quote the domestic routine of her father’s house, in the prosperous time when they lived in a detached house with a carriage drive and stabling. She was more than a bit of snob, but Jethro knew nothing of snobbery. He approved of all she did.

She gabbled on hygiene. She took tickets for a course of lectures on domestic economy, driving into Liddleshorn every alternate Friday. When she returned, she was more ardent than ever for reform. She penetrated to the scullery, and examined the dishcloth—with a scared murmur of microbes, because it had not been scalded in soda water and hung up in the air to dry. She insisted on making the tea herself in a patent pot. Once she said lightly that Gainah was trying to poison them all because she told the cook to boil halfpence with the cabbage to make it green. The flash in Gainah’s eye had been sinister, but Pamela did not see it. She laughed Jethro out of his favorite supper—a loaf hot from the oven and soaked in cider. She tried very hard to abolish supper as a meal—wishing to call the eight-o’clock meal dinner. But here she was stopped by the opposition of every member of the family; even Aunt Sophy entered a diplomatic protest.

She begged Jethro to make Chalcraft wring the necks of the poultry. She couldn’t bear the slow sounds of death. It was barbarous—the slight, skillful slit of the knife, the long bleeding, the fluttering “glug-glug” in the throat, growing fainter and fainter. Gainah had always insisted on that method; she said it made the flesh white. Gainah shut the doomed birds for twenty-four hours before death in a coop, and made them fast, so that they might be more easily got ready for table: Pamela went surreptitiously to the corn sack, and gave them an extra feed before the ordeal. Gainah, in hot weather, hung meat down the well to keep it fresh; she buried sour milk in the earth, tied up in a muslin bag, and dug it up cream cheese. She had a theory about leg of mutton: it should be buried in the earth for three days to make it tender; the same might be done with an old hen. She did not approve of eggs in a milk pudding, and never used butter in white sauce if the milk was new and not skimmed. To waste nothing, to be lavish with nothing—that had been her religion. The hygiene lecturer—through Pamela, who conscientiously took notes—told her that some of her antique tricks were not only dirty, but dangerous.

Pamela taught the cook to make bread without touching it with the hand. She told Boyce how to milk the cows, washing his hands in an antiseptic first. She had chemical tests for the milk, and made a rigorous inspection of the dairy each morning. Gainah was calmly put aside as a domestic fossil. She was openly flouted. She was told to sit by the fire, to do nothing. Even needlework was not necessary—things could be bought so cheaply ready-made, ready-marked even.

She was pushed aside. She must do nothing. Yet for over thirty years she had done everything. Her life had been one long fury of immaculate housekeeping according to her lights. She had thrown all the fierce energy of a naturally passionate woman into her dairy and her store-room. Love had just brushed her, then slipped away; maternity had never been hers. Religion she regarded as a respectable duty, varied by the clergyman coming to tea, which was a nervous trial, and meant getting out the best china. She couldn’t write poems, or lecture, or be an athlete; every outlet of the emotional woman was denied her by circumstance or temperament. She had flung herself upon the altar of good management, and now she was told that good management was not an art—it was the merest detail in the day’s work of a truly capable woman.

She said nothing. But there was a constant throbbing and seething in her aching head, above the turgid eyes. If Pamela could have foreseen, could have guessed, she might have been more temperate, more gradual. But she was sublimely unconscious.

On those autumn nights the heavy rain drove down from the hills and swept the sad common and beat against the thick walls of the farm. The wind skirled across space, and the cider-press creaked and moaned. Gainah let the press out to the villagers if they cared to make cider. They paid her so much an hour for the use of it. This was one of her economies.

Jethro would sit and sprawl and blink at the fire like a well-fed, thoroughly satisfied, and sleepy dog after a day in the covers. Now and again in the course of the evening he would get up, stretch his arms, shake himself, fling back the doors, and look deep into the black night. He was such a hearty, open-air being that he seemed to pant at intervals for draughts of that strong wind down his throat, for an angry splutter of the shot-like rain in his eyes.

When the wind blew in, Gainah, her back creaking and cold with rheumatism at the merest draught, would say with acerbity:

“You come from Hartin’, where they have no doors.”

The rustic sarcasm was quite lost on Pamela. She regarded the old woman as antiquated, dirty, and even slightly half-witted. All her attention centered on Jethro.

When he walked across the room she watched him slyly. She admired him very much. He was so big and strong; so independent. The men of her acquaintance had always been under orders—Government clerks, and so on. Here was a man, savage in his strength, who had never been in bondage except to the great Earth. She admired him, but she didn’t love him yet.

Love! She would never love him; never. She didn’t want to. She prayed that the acrid taste of Love might never sear her lips again. And then she thought of the prison. And the cruel wall rose up before her blinding eyes, and her quick fingers dropped the pencil and caught nervously at her side.

Jethro would come back to the fire and sink luxuriously into the big horsehair-covered chair with the protecting ears. He would put out his foot in the thick boot and touch the glowing logs. His gun was in the corner just as he had left it when he came in tired and muddy from pheasant shooting. Pamela was afraid of the gun, but it pleased her. It was part of Jethro’s strength and masculinity. So were his careless clothes, and so was his blunt Shaksperean tongue. She liked a man to be frank, a little coarse even, when the man was Jethro. She once thought fancifully that she wouldn’t mind being beaten by a man like that.

She already began to regard him as her own possession. She felt a personal pride in him; the very hang of his homespun tweeds on his tough, spare body seemed eloquent of sturdy independence.

The yellow firelight glided across the brass rosette-like heads of the fire-dogs. They seemed to wink knowingly at every flicker. Now and again the two hounds in the barn snarled as an infrequent foot came slouching along the wet road, for it was always raining and blowing. Rain, mist, and wind! These were the elements which watched over the slow, reluctant growth of Pamela’s love for big Jethro.

Sometimes he read a paragraph from the paper to Gainah—about local doings or people. Sometimes he would ask her advice—about a sale of underwood or the fate of a cow. Sometimes he and Pamela would be left alone for a moment, and then they were both shy. Neither of them forgot that this was a time of probation. Who knew? When the rain and wind and mist of next autumn came they might be man and wife.

Autumn grew to winter. She was happy—with a hushed dull happiness that she wished would last forever. No anxieties, no fierce, tearing burst of emotion, gay or sad. She was happy; satisfied with the mild amusements of the simple family connections. They no longer irritated her—these placid, narrow women—slow and heavy, but very useful and harmless. She laughed at Mrs. Clutton’s extravagances, but did not indorse them. She had become very intimate with the dark, sarcastic woman whose husband was abroad.

She had her little excitements—skating parties, small dances, occasionally the visit of a dramatic company to Liddleshorn. In this way winter went. The last snow melted into a puddle; the first flowers of March came. She was delighted with the dazzling white of the arabis. Gainah called it snow-on-the-mountains; but Annie Jayne, who brought her baby round in the mail-cart on sunny mornings, said that “dear mother” had always called it March-pride.

She ran out frequently to look at the thin green spears which begun to bristle in the borders: these were her bulbs. She spent long hours in her new greenhouse, giving Daborn orders. He was retained exclusively for the garden now, at her wish. There wasn’t a weed to be seen, and every bed was raked and cleaned.

As the sun strengthened in the sky Gainah grew more silent than ever. Spring was here, summer on the way, and she had nothing to do. Pamela had taken the keys. The maids went to her for orders. She paid them their wages and gave them each an evening out during the week—an indulgence which until her coming had never been dreamt of.

Nothing to do! Not wanted! In her idle hours Gainah wandered over the rambling house alone, going from room to room, touching things without meaning, taking up and putting down; mumbling vaguely to herself. One morning she put on her shabby cloth cap—an old one of Jethro’s—and went into the garden. It was raining—a soft, warm rain, with the sun behind it.

“Good growing weather,” she said to herself with satisfaction—and then remembered that the garden had been taken from her.

Winter storms had made the borders draggled in spite of Daborn’s labor and Pamela’s enthusiasm. Gainah felt, in a fumbling, wordless way, that this garden was like the devastation of her own life. She carried a little fork; force of habit had made her get it from the tool-shed. Now and then, again from habit, she bent her stiff back to dig out a weed; but there were no weeds.

The stalks of the Michaelmas daisies had been left—by Pamela’s orders, so that the frost might not get down to the roots. Gainah viewed the stiff clumps of brown wood with injury; her rule had been to cut down everything in November. She remembered that she had promised a bit of white daisy to Chalcraft’s “missus” in exchange for a deep purple one with a golden eye—her generosity took the form of barter.

She went round and round in the spraying rain. There was no wind, simply a feeling of soft, patient dampness and melancholy in the garden. Over the wall was the sodden, empty road, and on the horizon the streaming, formless hills.

Her eyes spied out a few self-sown hardy plants in the neatly-raked beds. She dropped little fragments of criticism as she went.

“The slugs have been at the ‘reckless’ plants,” she murmured regretfully, stooping to look more closely at a clump of sickly auricula, which seemed mostly thick stalk.

“There’s a Glory in bud already. I remember old Jethro budding the brier. He was a good hand at budding, and it was a wet season, with the sap running well, that year. Ah! the Glory Die! John makes a fine head on a standard.”

She touched the yellow bud—a little pinched and small—with tender fingers. A faint touch of red rushed into her white face.

“That green Yule when she was taken,”—she was thinking of Jethro’s mother—“I picked a Glory full out on Christmas morning, and kept it in water for more ’n a week. The hard frost came soon after—the hardest for forty years. The old sow was frozen stiff in the sty, and Joan Wadey’s boy was out digging swedes for old Farmer Scotter, and he set down and his breeches turned into ice and burned into his flesh. I mind that—and the Glory blooming on the shelf.”

Perhaps it was the memory of the frost and the sow who fell a victim to it; at all events, she went round to the piggeries, taking a stick from the bristling fagot stack on the way. It had always been one of her recreations to stand over the sty and scratch the great rough backs of the animals. She did it now, rubbing the stick insinuatingly up and down, across and across, and almost fancying that the thick grunts held meaning, and that there were appreciation, friendliness, and compassion in the small, slitlike eyes that looked up at her.

Then, restless and idle, she went round again to the garden and stood staring stupidly at the red, newly graveled paths and the glass of the new greenhouse. She could see Daborn inside pricking out seedlings into boxes.

There was a weedy patch—the one weedy patch—in a corner of the garden. She fetched the spud and began to dig for dandelion-roots. She had almost forgotten that she made dandelion-tea every spring and insisted on Jethro taking a cup in the morning to clear his liver. She took them up, transferring them from her knotted, earth-caked hand to her apron. She meant to take them back to the house, wash them, cut them up, and infuse them in water for a certain number of hours. But halfway along the path she stopped blankly, a sudden thought dismaying her. Pamela would not let her make the tea. Scalding childish tears rose in her eyes. She felt sure she would not be allowed to make the dandelion-tea. She went stumblingly back to the weed-grown patch and let the roots drop in a little hill from her apron to the ground. Then she looked up, and saw old Chalcraft, who was beginning to trench up the farther end. He was leaning idly on his spade, watching her with affectionate solicitude. There was a little suspicion mixed with his compassion; your true rustic is always distrustful of what he doesn’t understand. She, standing there idle, vacant, with a still tongue, was a mystery. He didn’t know what blighting thing had touched and turned her.

She stood there stupidly, dead to the familiar sounds on the farm—the excited cluck of laying hens, two cocks crowing in rivalry, the weak bleat of very early lambs in the fold, and the yapping of puppies in the barn. She didn’t hear the steady break of stones in the road, nor the song of a lark as it rose from the neighboring field.

The weedy patch had last year been sown with beet. Sparrows had eaten it—beet on that soil being, with carrots and spinach, a chance crop. Chalcraft was digging the weeds in and preparing to make a second sowing of broad beans. Pamela had not yet brought her reforming intellect to bear on the kitchen-garden; she thought vegetables very uninteresting.

The spade was deep in the stiff soil. The piece that Chalcraft had already turned up was wet and yellow in contrast to the hard gray of the untouched piece. Gainah watched him closely, as if he had been a stranger and digging was to her a new and intricate performance. She saw his bald head: there was a red, shining wen on one side. There were two careful patches, side by side and of a different color and stuff, on the back of his waistcoat.

“You’ve got another patch on the back of your waistcoat, Master Chalcraft,” she said childishly.

He spat thoughtfully, first on the palms of his hands and then into the trench where the weeds were buried. He looked at her—looked with the slow wonder of the aged, to whom nothing matters very much. Then he said, with a chuckle:

“Aye! so there be! Patch side by side look neighborly, but patch upon patch be beggarly, Mis’ Toat.”

She didn’t answer. She still stood in that wavering, uncertain way on the other side of the trench.

“The worms in this ’ere patch is past believin’,” he said, with an infantile slobber and chuckle, at last, stolidly chopping through the writhing bunches.

“It must be nearly dinner-time, Master Chalcraft,” said Gainah mechanically, with a steady glare across the trench with her pale eyes.

“Aye, that it be,” he returned rather nervously; “I’ve had mine.”

She turned and went back to the path. He stood and watched her. He was conscious, in his slow-witted way, that some queer change had come to her. The sun broke through the rain-cloud and touched the silver tip of his spade and the hard red lump on his head. He bent his back again and turned up slab after slab of sticky ground.

Gainah went round to the front of the house. She had a bed of lilies of the valley beneath the umbrella yew. She stooped down behind the wall of somber green and saw the tender leaves uncurling. One root already had a cluster of snowy buds. Then, as she stooped, she heard a voice—the high, imperious voice of Pamela. Looking through the yew, she saw her standing by the wall with Jethro. She was talking very fast, moving impetuously now and then, throwing out her firm white hands, and pointing eagerly.

“It would be the simplest thing in the world. Oh, you must do it—please. Then the house would look like Turle. You take away the gate and build the wall along—so. Then you take up those horrid cabbages.” She threw a look of intolerance at the leggy stalks of Brussels sprouts which were thickly covered with widely opened miniature cabbages.

“Chalcraft likes this patch. It is the richest in the garden, so he says. In June the old man will dibble in his cauliflowers; they want a rich soil.”

“They’ll grow anywhere; ground is ground,” she cried, with Cockney superiority. “You are too indulgent to Chalcraft; he and Gainah are past work. They should be pensioned off. She might be allowed to come to dinner on Sundays.”

“She has been a mother to me.”

Gainah, behind the yew, her head furtively poked forward, saw the girl look at him—a look that said plainly enough:

“And shall not I be your wife? Doesn’t a man leave all and cleave to his wife?”

The elder woman’s hands, rubbed over with wet mold which was drying and caking, crossed convulsively on her chest. This was not new to her—this comedy of love. She had played it, too, with something less of fancy. She knew what was coming. She waited, sick at heart, for the first kiss. She nearly fell upon the half-opened leaves of the young lilies when Jethro dropped his massive head and pointed his lips to Pamela’s. Her fingers lost their last hold of the domestic scepter when she heard the quick, liquid chirrup of his kiss on the firm scarlet flesh.

[CHAPTER VII.]

PAMELA ran up to her room with the long, low lattice window and the somber furniture. She threw herself full length on the old sofa which she had rescued from one of the attics and covered in the most approved be-frilled style with cretonne. Her head was back on the cushions, her sparkling eyes were on a level with the garden. She looked at the Brussels sprouts with satisfaction, imagining shaven emerald turf and lozenge-shaped beds of standard roses and geraniums in their place.

She was going to marry Jethro. Their eyes and lips had met—the thing was settled. Men did not propose in set words and the conventional attitude nowadays. She would marry Jethro. Her future life stretched out before her—smooth, level, pleasant—like the big tennis lawn at Turle. She thought of all the country houses round where she was sure of a hearty welcome because she was a cousin. They were comfortable, easy people, these Turles and Crisps and Jaynes and Furlongers. She had grown really fond of Nancy, with her simper, her pretty pink face, and her glorious red hair. Annie Jayne, in her spick and span nursery with her beaming face bent over her baby boy and her lips flowing forth pious reminiscences of her mother, had her own particular charm. To be simple, to be sterling, that was all one wanted; everything else was garish, meretricious. Hearts were better than the flimsy things called brains.

She saw her life roll away year after year, so placid, so uneventful, so comfortable and prosperous. She loved money for her pleasure, not her pocket. She always felt her greatest admiration for Jethro when he hauled out a canvas bag of sovereigns.

She began to form social plans. She would be exclusive, yet catholic, like Aunt Sophy. Jethro must let her have another servant—that would be three. The wagonette must be done up, and she’d try for a Battlesden car like Furlonger’s. She’d aim at culture, too—a Browning class, in opposition to Mrs. McAlpine’s Shakspere. There wouldn’t be so many expurgations necessary. The members of the Shakspere class had neatly written slips sent them with a list of passages to be slurred. She would like to take a rise out of Mrs. McAlpine, who lived in a cottage, but gave herself tremendous airs because she was a J. P.’s daughter, and had instituted afternoon tea with cucumber or cress sandwiches.

In the afternoon she slipped on her things and went to the Buttery, the ancient cottage where the absentee journalist’s wife lived with a small maid. Mrs. Clutton had become her most confidential friend. She didn’t mean to mention her engagement, but she was twitching with excitement, dragged here and there with emotions of very different sorts.

She went across the common in the March sun and wind. Her heart and feet danced, but her face was like the changing sky. Forget! She must forget. She was to marry Jethro. It was so easy to say forget, so difficult to do it. Once she stopped, her eyes strained in the direction of London—far away over moor and hill and sleek pasture. She groaned aloud. She knew that she would give it all—greenhouse, Battlesden, big, fond man with the bulging bag of sovereigns—for one touch on the mouth from one other man. He was still in prison, still only a number behind the high wall. When he came out? Emigration or the army. But that was not her affair.

When she reached the Buttery she went through the high green trellis door into the garden, sure of finding her hostess there on such a day, at such a season. It was a fair-sized garden in apple-pie order. The long borders were gay. At one end were substantial pig-sties. In them Mrs. Clutton kept fowls. She was leaning over the wall, her elbows spread out on the wire netting which was nailed across to keep the birds from flying over.

She came running excitedly along the neat asphalt path. In one hand she held an egg. It was evidently only just laid. It hardened as the air touched it.

“Look!” she said with a laugh, “I’m going to give this to the cock. What would your thrifty Gainah say? They are all going—my pet hens—Flirt and Prim and Sheila. My cock, too—Tatters. Isn’t he a fine fellow? But morals! None. They are neurotic. Old Chalcraft says they eat their eggs because the floor of the run is brick and they can’t scratch. I hate a person who snouts round for a practical solution. It’s just environment—because I am their mistress. Tatters has been more trouble to me than able-bodied twins. I fed him from the very shell with hard-boiled egg and bread-crumb, thereby sowing the seed of future vice, no doubt. I’ve scrubbed his legs with carbolic and anointed him with vaseline for scaly-leg. I read about it in a paper. I came and stood out here, paper in hand, comparing his leg with the symptoms. And then, after all, I found that humpy-bumpy legs were natural to that particular breed. I was overjoyed at his first baby-crow—such a throaty, silly sound.

“To be practical—the eggs went. Every time Flirt or Prim or Sheila cackled I rushed out, only to find them stalking gravely up and down with an unconscious expression faintly tinged with injury. And then one day I saw that villain Tatters gulping down the last bit of shell. I’ve sold them at a sacrifice, on condition that they are sent to market and not allowed to demoralize another run. Hone will be here directly; he’s taking them to Liddleshorn. But—Tatters—here!”

She threw the egg, flinging back her head at the same moment. The cock rushed at it. In an instant it was gone, yellow yolk, brown shell, stringy white. Mrs. Clutton shrugged and pushed the picturesque black hair from her brow. Pamela said, with a laugh:

“Well, you are mad. No one else would have done that.”

“Of course not. I get more and more ridiculous. But what can one do? I pay afternoon calls and say mad things. You must shock the people down here—it’s your only chance. I’m bound to talk extravagantly. You can’t discuss gravely for a whole afternoon whether servants should be allowed to wear veils on their afternoons out, or whether it is really economical to wash at home. I wonder what Tim’s first impression of me will be when he comes home!”

“You expect him soon?”

“Who knows!” She shrugged and led the way into the house. “He’s irresponsible. I got these at a sale—and these—and these.” She pointed out various ornaments on the shelf of her sitting-room. “And Tryphena says that old Mrs. Hillyar is dead. So I shall be able to get her tallboys chest of drawers for the merest trifle: collectors have no conscience.”

“Does Mr. Clutton care for old things?” Pamela looked round intolerantly at the mixed collection of antique furniture and bric-a-brac which crowded the room.

“Of course. He is most artistic: master of every art—except that of earning a decent living. As for hobbies! He has exhausted them. I suggested that paying his debts would be a novel one—a complete collection of receipted bills! But the idea didn’t appeal to him. He was never afflicted with the form of indigestion called conscience.”

“He’s a journalist?”

“Yes; most brilliant. He assimilates everything—but his food. A confirmed dyspeptic; he would have three serious internal diseases in one week.”

Tryphena Hone, the little maidservant, brought in tea. The two young women sat and chatted until the room grew dark. When the lamp came in, it burned steadily. Pamela said:

“Our lamps never burn like that. Yet I see to them myself. Aunt Sophy taught me her own particular way of trimming a lamp.”

“My lamp burns well because I never see to it myself. The whole duty of the foolish young housekeeper is ‘doing the lamps.’

“I was telling you about Tim.” She seemed in a confidential mood. “He was brought up to the profession of great expectations. One’s greatest curse is a modest competence. We had it—until Tim’s father died, without even leaving him the shilling with which he cut him off. We hadn’t a halfpenny. Tim, with his unfailing originality, suggested earning a living, but his profession had spoiled him. He was like the Irishman who was willing to do anything but work or run errands. I took in boarders, but it didn’t pay; I never happened on a paying paying guest. He tried journalism; every failure tries that. At last a man on a rather prominent paper—worn out with importunities, no doubt—shipped him to South America and told him to study out-of-the-way sides of things. He paid him for it, too. His articles have been a great success. It really seems as if our luck has turned. Journalists are short-sighted; the man need not have sent him abroad in search of novelty. I could tell strange tales. Every cottage here has its skeleton, and I wheedle round the old people until they show me the bones. I am making a note-book for Tim—he can write a series of articles on Sussex skeletons when he comes home.”

She looked round at her bits of china and brass; at the shabby furniture which she had picked up at sales and in odd corners.

“Every little thing,” she said, “has its history. Such tender tales—such fierce, curdling, terrible tales—I hear from plodding men and heavy women in these little Sussex cottages! And it is all the more impressive because they are so phlegmatic. They tell you of a ruined life much more calmly than they would tell you of a bad batch of bread or a chicken stolen by the fox.”

Pamela was hardly listening. Her feet were on the gleaming rail of the pierced brass fender; her eyes thoughtful on the winking coals.

“Do you consider one runs a risk in marrying?” she asked tentatively at last.

“No risk—if you marry for the right motive. I haven’t found out what that is: not money; not duty—only prigs do their duty; not impulse; certainly not love.”

“Can one marry for peace?”

“Maybe. Peace is a great thing; I’ve found that since dear Tim went away and took his imaginary incurable troubles with him. I would write over every baby girl’s cradle: ‘DON’T MARRY A DYSPEPTIC!’

“Must you really go? Here is Nancy’s latest photograph.” She took it from the table. “Of course you have one. Nancy is just the average woman—insatiable desire to have herself photographed in evening-dress. Nancy is stupid; she actually believed that a Papal Bull was a live animal. Just wit enough to dress her magnificent hair according to the latest fashion plate—that’s Nancy! She’s callous, too. The other day she ran down one of the Peter Buckman children when she was cycling. She only said calmly that it ‘was bad for the wheel.’ Fortunately the child wasn’t hurt.”

Pamela went home in bright moonlight; it was only a stone’s throw from the Buttery to Folly Corner.

She thought calmly of her future as she walked: the moon, the sweet, crisp March night cooled and stilled her. She was not going to marry for love. To marry for love had once been the dear dream of her life. But that was over; the prison had engulfed her poor romance—it had been a mean one at the best. It was all over—the first wild, keen shame and rebellion, the steadfast belief in him, the passionate waiting for the future. It was all over—dead. She was going to marry Jethro; going to take refuge in his kindliness—as if he were a wayside barn on a wet day. She meant to be a good wife, a happy wife. Nothing was more contemptible than a tiresome, melancholy woman with a past.

[CHAPTER VIII.]

SHE was loitering in the drawing-room next morning when Jethro came in. There was a strong touch of out-door sweetness about him. He was not one of those men who smell of hot rooms and tobacco.

He went up and kissed her, taking her fair round face reverently in his hands as a matter of course. She was thrilled, not with love, but with pleasure at the open adoration in his light blue eyes. His great hands placed gently under her chin, his fine head well set on his broad shoulders, and his big limbs in the breeches and gaiters, stirred in her the primitive passion of woman for brute strength in a man.

He threw himself on the couch and blinked lazily at the gewgaws of the room, which his very presence always made so trivial. Then he lugged out his worn brown pocket-book and took from it a slip of paper roughly torn from a newspaper. Directly she saw it Pamela’s cheeks blazed, and the same agonized shame and degradation which she had felt on her first visit to that room she felt then.

“Come here.”

He spoke gently, yet with command; the voice of a man who after marriage will tell his wife to fetch his slippers or his pipe, as if service were a matter of course.

She stepped into the great embrasure of the bay window and sat down on the green-covered walnut-wood chair—just as she had sat down on the first day. Her eyes looked straight ahead, not at ripe grain, but at the burning purple of furrowed earth.

Jethro touched her idle hand with the privileged tenderness of an accepted lover.

“You are a slipped thing,” he said fondly.

“Slipped?”

“Slender, then. I always fancied a woman with a trim, hard waist like yours. But I came to talk business.”

He held out the roughly torn bit of newspaper.

“Tear it up,” she said thickly.

Her head hung on her bosom and her eyes fell until the lashes rested on her flaming skin.

“Not yet.”

She put out her hand to snatch it from him, with the wicked, stealthy air of a cat after a bird. Until that shameful bit of paper was destroyed her womanhood was vulgarized.

“Give it me,” she besought humbly.

He laid it in her open hand and she tore it into minute bits, opened the casement, and cast it out. The wind caught it, carried it, and shed it like snowflakes over the ridged furrows.

“We needn’t wait long for the wedding,” he said, as she latched the casement and came back to the green chair.

It pleased him to watch her changing face, now pink like Nancy’s, now white like the hidden skin on his own arms and chest.

“When you like,” she returned docilely—thinking it would be better to settle soon.

“And I’ve drawn you a check—a year’s salary and a year more instead of notice,” he continued, twisting up his face into cunning wrinkles with satisfaction at his own artifice. “Take Aunt Sophy with you into Liddleshorn and buy clothes.”

She took the strip of paper, her eyes dilating at the magnificence of the amount.

“You are a great deal too good to me.”

“When we are married,” he went on, pressing her hand jovially, “I’ll make any alterations about the place you like. But the carriage drive must wait till winter—hedging and ditching time; labor’s cheap then. How about inside?”

“I should like a bath-room.”

“You shall have it. And nurseries.” His voice was perfectly matter-of-fact. “The two sunny rooms up top will do. I’ll have bars to the windows; it’s as well to be ready.”

“Not too ready,” she said faintly, hardly knowing whether to retreat or to laugh.

“A son,” Jethro said dreamily, “to come beating with me when shooting’s on. They soon grow up. He shall have a little horse and ride to hounds. We say in these parts about a woman’s children:

“If ye’ve got one, ye can run. If ye’ve got two, ye can goo.

But if ye’ve got three ye must bide where ye be.”

She got up nervously, not knowing whether he would be betrayed into rustic sayings yet more suggestive.

“I’d like to go to Liddleshorn to-morrow,” she said, folding the check in her purse. “There will be time before dinner to run over to Turle and see if Aunt Sophy can come with me—if you wish it.”

“She’s a splendid manager.”

“Very well. I’ll take her and Nancy. What are you doing this morning? We might go to Turle together.”

“I must see Boyce”—(he was the cowman)—“about those newly dropped lambs. He thought maybe you’d like a sock.”

“A what?”

“A sock—pet lamb.”

“That would be nice—but, when it grew a sheep?”

“You could send it to the butcher.”

“Never. Tell Boyce, with thanks for his remembrance, I’d rather not. Well, good-by until dinner.”

She ran upstairs, humming complacently, and in a leisurely way put on her short skirt and narrow-brimmed hat. Through her window she saw Jethro cross the garden and stroll into the yard, his broad shoulders proudly back and his hands deep in his breeches pockets. Her heart swelled with satisfaction—in him and in the broad acres, plowed or pasture, and in the beautifully built golden ricks which hedged the house. Everything was hers.

She went downstairs. Gainah, for the first time for ten years, had gone out for the day to see an old friend some miles up the line. Pamela thought that the house seemed more like home, more her own, without the elder woman, and she began to speculate on the time when Folly Corner would no longer roof them both.

She stood in the passage by the window. Gainah’s geraniums, preserved from frost in the kitchen all through the winter, were blooming. The future mistress decided that she would banish them. She had not reached the altitude of admiring an earthenware pot. Then she glanced at the wall, at the rude prints in narrow black frames. Mrs. Clutton had been enthusiastic about them, saying they were “Bunbury’s”—which meant nothing to Pamela. She couldn’t endure those fat women in low dresses, and those men with wigs and lewd expressions.

She sat down in the armchair by the oak table, idly putting on her gloves. There was a hand-bell on the table—one of her institutions—together with a smart tray for letters. The blue Oriental bowl, instead of being littered with string and screwed envelopes, was reserved for cards, and in place of the farming papers was the current copy from the library of the most cultured magazine then running its brief life. She thought that the extraordinary cover struck a distinctive note directly one entered the house.

The kitchen door was at the other end of the passage, immediately opposite the drawing-room. It was ajar. She was just stretching her gloved hand to the bell, to tell them that Daborn might bring round her bicycle, when a man’s voice struck on her heart.

At first she half struggled to her feet, and they failed her. Then she fell back in the chair helplessly, like a woman with an overstrained spine. That voice! His voice! No. It couldn’t be. There was very little in a voice; each individual had not the monopoly of one. Now, a face would be different. How absurd she was! The dates did not agree. She had a head for dates, and that one—the date of his release—had eaten into her brain like an acid into metal. It was too soon.

The air through the open window—she had opened it herself only a minute ago, before the world changed—was warm. The full red heads of the geraniums nodded heavily with occasional puffs of vigorous March wind. It was a warm, noisy world. The beseeching, persistent bleat of the little new lambs rung like a mournful bell with every second, and through it filtered the confused song of every madly happy bird that had mated and built a nest.

She put out her hand again for the bell, calling herself a fanciful, nervous fool. As she gripped the handle she heard the voice again—persuasive, winning. Hadn’t she often heard it like that? It said:

“You can have one by very easy payments.”

The bell fell on the table, rolled off, and clanged its noisy tongue as it touched the oak floor. The pretty, ruddy housemaid came in, looked flurried. She left the kitchen door wide behind her, and Pamela saw the well-scrubbed table, the gleaming brass preserving-pan on top of an oak corner cupboard in which candles, soaps, and so on were stored. She could, with the tail of her eye, see the back door leading to the flagged yard, and she seemed to feel that he was standing there. Certainly someone was there, because the sheep dog, who was so savage on the chain, barked angrily.

“I want my bicycle,” she said as calmly as she could, “and, Nettie, who is that at the back door?”

“A piker—I beg pardon, miss—a tramp. Yet not just a piker; he never begged. But he wants me and Cook to buy a sewing-machine, paying it off by little bits each month.”

“I shouldn’t like the noise of a sewing-machine in the kitchen.”

“Then I’ll tell him to go away.”

“Nettie.”

“Yes, miss.”

“I was just going to say that—I forget. I remember—you need not speak to Daborn about the bicycle for a few moments. I’ll go into the garden and find him myself.”

“Very well, miss.”

The buxom figure of the country girl in her deep pink gown went round the half-opened door. Pamela sat, her head against the wall, a sound like the thudding, throbbing noise of an engine-room in her head and at her waist. Suddenly she stretched out her hand and rang the bell again. The housemaid came round the door for the second time, looking a little surprised.

“Has he gone?”

“No, miss. Cook’s going to have a machine—not to work here, miss. She’s to be married next club day.”

“I should like to see him. Perhaps the machines are good and cheap. Tell him to step through.”

The pink figure disappeared again and she waited—sick, expectant, dreading; disgusted with herself for the half delight which she felt, a delight which nearly swamped the fear.

He came through the door and they shut it after him. There was no mistake. Her ears had not played her false. Directly he saw her sitting there, beneath the row of black-framed prints, beside the shining brown table which held the great bowl of blue, he gave a start, a whistle of astonishment, and said under his breath:

“Pam!”

She looked at him for an instant—cropped hair, shoddy clothes, blunted nails, the evasive stamp of something new and perplexing on his handsome face:

“Edred!”

She was looking apprehensively down the long garden path which ran between the box edgings. Jethro might come in. Then she again turned her eyes with an effort toward the tall figure in the deplorable suit of ginger-colored tweed. In spite of herself, an expression of ecstasy broke across the cloud above her eyes. She half rose, put out her hand, peaked her head toward him. He gave a quick glance round; listened. Everything was still, but for the lambs and birds and insects; no sound of human life, no clink or clatter from the kitchen. He stepped up lithely to the chair, lifted her in his long arms, and kissed her—a long kiss which told volumes—full on the mouth. With that kiss, fully returned, each told the history of the weary months the prison had stolen.

She let herself lie for a moment in his arms, caring for nothing in the world but that first re-union which she had so often imagined, so often longed for. Then she roused herself.

“Why did you come?” she said reproachfully. “Oh, my darling, why did you come and spoil everything?”

He shrugged.

“We don’t know that anything is spoilt yet. I wouldn’t stand in your light for worlds. Tell me how you came here. Give me my cue.”

“Come into the other room. We shall be quieter there.”

He followed her through the low door into the room which the yew shadowed. They were no longer in the sun; something damp, melancholy, and threatening struck at them both.

“Sit down,” she said, pointing nervously to a chair, taking one herself, and throwing a quick glance at the brass face of the tall clock. “I—I didn’t know you were out. I thought that it would be another six months——”

He stuck out his long legs and sunk his hands in his pockets. He was tall and slim and elegant. At each gesture she was more than ever his slave—it brought back remembrance. Her eyes hardly left his face—dark, sallow, cruel. A sardonic-looking man, with silky black hair half veiling his scoffing mouth, and sleepy eyes which seemed always to be mocking.

“Haven’t you ever heard,” he asked airily, “of a ticket-of-leave?”

She shivered as she answered, well down in her dry throat, “I think so.”

“Tell me how you came here, and what part I’m expected to play. I’m down on my luck at present, and you may be able to help me. Look at these clothes.” He touched the sacklike cloth. “Nothing but paper. The first shower would reduce me to pulp.”

“I came here,” she said, “in answer to an advertisement. A man—the man who owns this house—wanted a wife.”

“Whew! Such is the faithfulness of woman! But it was clever of you—confoundedly clever.”

“Don’t! It nearly killed me. He is so kind, so fond of me. He believes I am his cousin—his mother was a Crisp. There are other confirming details. Very likely I am his cousin—that doesn’t matter. They have all been kind—my new relations. They think that he advertised for information about his mother’s brother—who disappeared in early life—and that I, as a surviving child, answered. They never troubled for fuller proof; they take my word——”

“Very useful people!”

“That flippant tongue of yours,” she flashed out, “brings back bitter memories.”

“Never mind memories—no time for them. Go on with your story. At present I’m uncomfortable; don’t know my ground. If he should come in——”

“Jethro!” She looked alarmed, and seemed to strain her ears for outside sounds.

“Queer name. Jethro—what?”

“Jayne.”

“Jethro Jayne! He ought to be the villain in a melodrama—wicked squire or something of that sort. And are you going to marry him, Pam?”

She caught her hands across her breast theatrically.

“I—I don’t know. You have changed everything.”

“Not at all. I’ll free you. I’m not”—he gave his soft, callous laugh—“in a position to keep a wife, and he is. As Mrs. Jethro Jayne you might be very useful to me.”

“As Mrs. Jethro Jayne I dare not look at you.”

“Pooh! You were always too intense. Marry him and help me. That would be the act of a sensible woman. You are quite free.”

“Absolutely free,” she assented dreamily, looking a little wildly at the handsome face.

She was free; in no sense was she tied to him. She wasn’t in his power; he couldn’t rake up against her any discreditable past. This was not the stock position of the sensational drama—confiding husband, blackmailing lover, wife with unclean or imprudent past. She was free, free, free! Free to order him away from the house and out of her life. If Jethro came in she could afford to tell the truth. There was nothing wrong in it.

And yet, hating herself all the time, because she knew he wasn’t worthy, she adored this dark-haired cynical ex-criminal. His prison taint, marked elusively on his face, only made her yearn over him the more. Free! And yet chained like a slave. She cursed and despised herself for the contemptible, dog-like devotion which a true woman calls love. She couldn’t send him away. She couldn’t live without him. She wanted him to kiss her again, to call her Pam in that careless, caressing voice. Jethro was nothing—but a good-natured money-bag. This man had been the first to stir in her some wonderful, untamable passion. She was insisting to her heart that a woman must always love the first, return to him, cleave to him, however unworthy he may be.

There were steady steps outside. Someone was coming round the house, brushing the wall across which the vine spread its stout arms. She knew the step. She knew the melodious whistle. It was Jethro. She pictured him coming in his leisurely way round to the garden door, little dreaming; his hands stuck in the pockets of his shooting breeches, his cap a little tilted over his eyes to keep the hard March sun out.

She sprang to her feet. The man sprang up too. He had heard the steps before she heard them. His life had been one that lent itself to stealth and minute caution. He knew that the next moment would decide her, and consequently would decide his fate. He had no claim on her—she might turn him adrift if she chose, as he had reminded her. And he much preferred to stay. Lucky accident had brought him here. Selling sewing-machines by easy payments at the back door was not a life to his taste.

The steady, leisurely steps grew more distinct. The two—desperate girl and desperate man—were close, eye to eye. With a fleet movement he folded his arms about her and kissed her for the second time on the mouth. She whispered fiercely, as soon as she got her breath:

“When I came—that first day—he asked me if I had brothers or sisters. I thought of you—you were never out of my head. Something, someone—God or the devil—made me say I had a brother, a sailor on a long voyage. You understand?”

“Perfectly.” He nodded his head approvingly. “Now sit down, darling, and leave off trembling.”

The long, broad shadow of a man fell across the floor from the open door to the plinth of the tall clock. It stopped on the threshold. Pamela’s feet, which had turned numb and cold, were set fast. She tried to get up unconcernedly, but could only grip her hands round the curved arms of the rush-seated chair of golden beechwood. The last remnant of a struggle was fighting itself out within her. Should she stand up and say:

“I knew this man once. He boarded at the house where I was an assistant. He made love to me. I was flattered and I responded—but that was nothing. It was all over long ago. Send him away and let us be happy together as we have settled to be.”

Should she say that? Should she tell the bald, mean, ugly truth?

They were both looking at her—these two men who between them held the strings of her future. Jethro’s light eyes were a bit cold and hard. He was suspicious, like all simple men. She said, putting one hand stiffly toward the companion beechwood chair:

“This is my brother——”

She broke off, a nervous dread sealing her lips. She had nearly said “my brother Edred,” and then she could not remember whether, at that first interview in the big bay window, she had given him a name.

“My brother—the sailor,” she went on falteringly, her stiff hand still out, like the wooden arm of a signal, toward the chair in which he sat looking carelessly nonchalant. “He has come home from sea. His ship,” she seemed to see the suspicion deepen on Jethro’s open face as he glanced at the visitor’s rough hands and cheap suit, “was wrecked.”

“The Matador—wrecked off the coast of West Africa. I was second officer. A Dutch vessel ran into us. Made off without offering to help. That’s like those cowardly Dutchmen. I was hanging on to a mast for ten hours. Everything I had in the world gone, of course.”

The lies rolled glibly off his ready tongue. Pamela felt her cheeks flame as if hot irons had brushed them. She did not look up. Let these two settle her fate between themselves.

Jethro took a wide stride into the room and put out his brown hand.

“Glad to see you,” he said with simple heartiness. “Glad to see any of my mother’s people at Folly Corner.”

After that they went on talking. She didn’t hear a word—only the amicable voices. That Edred was smoothly lying she felt sure; that Jethro was taking every word as solemnly as he took his Bible or the advice of his head man she felt equally sure. They were so simple, so true, these Sussex folk. They had taken her on trust. They would take him on trust too—this unscrupulous jail-bird, her lover, hero, the wrecker of her life.

Why couldn’t she stand up and say:

“We are both liars and impostors. He is no sailor; merely a shady city man who has just served his time for dishonesty”?

He was talking cleverly of the sea, using nautical terms, fashioning his sentences tersely and rudely like a bluff sailor. What a clever, heartless villain he was—and how she loved him!

Nettie came in to lay the cloth for dinner. Pamela got up and walked across the room mechanically, beckoning to the maid to follow.

When they were outside in the sunny, narrow corridor she said—looking steadily into the girl’s unexpressive eyes:

“That gentleman is my brother—Mr. Edred Crisp.”

“The piker!—oh, miss, I ask your pardon.”

“He is a sailor,” Pamela went on steadily, “and he was wrecked. He went through dreadful hardships. Everything he had was lost at sea. He was obliged to sell machines for a living. It was quite by accident that he happened to come here and find me.”

“It was Providence sent him, miss.”

“Yes, Providence—of course. And you will lay for one extra at dinner, and you will get the best room ready.”

“To be sure I will, miss. Wrecked at sea! Whatever will Cook say when I tells her?”

“And Nettie.”

“Yes, miss. How pale you look, miss! It’s shook you, and no wonder.”

“Here are the keys. Get out some little things for dessert. I’ve told you how to manage for dessert. And the best table linen—and everything of the best.”

“To be sure, miss.”

She went back to the parlor. It struck a gray note after the stream of hopeful sun in the corridor. The yew—impenetrable, glistening, green—blocked the latticed window; logs on the yawning brick hearth had broken in the middle amid a wreck of wood-ash. She dropped on her knees and began to ply the bellows. Presently the smoke and flames curled blue and yellow round the wood, and reflected on her face, remorselessly showing the careworn line of her mouth and the hopeless droop of her lids. Edred had taken a piece of paper from his pocket and was drawing a pretended plan of something—it didn’t matter what—lies, of course—and he was talking glibly of the different parts of a ship and the habits of the natives off the coast of West Africa. Her hands moved softly on the bellows, and the gentle plaintive “shoo-shoo” as they puffed made a sad accompaniment to that high-pitched, eager voice and the occasional slow, mellow note of Jethro’s.

He was talking in his innocence of his mother’s brother. He spoke of the other uncle—Thomas—who had also been a sailor. He said that a love of the sea was evidently in the Crisp blood. And then he added heartily that he hoped Edred would make a long stay; the place was large enough and there was always a home for kindred. Pamela said nothing. She looked round fitfully from time to time. She blew the bellows more vigorously, with a fancy that the ruddy light should fall on those two faces near the table—one big and ruddy and restful, the other dark, sallow, full of a guilty, eager brilliance.

She could hardly breathe. Her heart was playing her such mad pranks. At one moment she could feel nothing but the most lawless, unrestrained delight at Edred’s return to her—in any circumstance. At the next she felt a profound pity for her own extraordinary position and the sudden sinister twirl of her fortunes. On Jethro she bestowed only one emotion, and that—mild contempt. The queer feminine twist—small regard for the man who blindly loves and is gulled—was strong in her. She had illogically looked to him to get her out of her difficulty. He was, in his ignorance, making things harder; he was placidly wrecking his own life. He loved her. She would have made him a good wife; she had a very grateful regard for him. If only she had gone to Turle ten minutes before! If she had been quicker in changing her gown! If, if, if! The little word, which sometimes means so much more than the very biggest in the language, chimed in her racked head.

How should she shape her course? Edred’s nautical sentences, coming to her now and then in a nonsensical jumble, disposed her to a sailor’s simile. With him under the same roof, with him in daily association, she could see only one thing possible—elopement with him when, if ever, he chose to suggest it. One kiss on the mouth from him would take her from Jethro, even at the moment when she stood with that confiding, admirable simpleton at the altar steps. One kiss, she shuddered, would win her from Jethro even if she were his wife of years’ standing. Contemptible, animal, womanly devotion!

Nettie came in again and lingered curiously, staring at the visitor. She had taken off her pink cotton and put on her black stuff, with the white collar and cuffs. The lappets of her cap floated to her neat waist. Pamela, with disgust, saw Edred look at her approvingly. She had often seen him look like that at any pretty parlor-maid they happened to have at the boarding-house. It was a low type of man who would smirk at a servant. He was really very vulgar; he hadn’t one good quality. And yet—she wished that big, stupid Jethro would leave them alone for a moment!

She hung the bellows on the nail and scrambled to her feet.

“You’d like to come up to your room,” she said, her pleading gray eyes on the flushed dark face and her feet moving toward the door.

He got up with alacrity. The ginger tweeds he wore were too short at the arms and legs, too wide across the back, but nothing could make him look anything but carelessly elegant. He had the lethargic air of the true Piccadilly product—the men you jostle by the dozen on the pavement there, who have just life enough and energy enough to put on an immaculate frock-coat, with a wired flower in the buttonhole.

They went up the oak stairs and into the best spare room. Pamela shut the door.

“It’s a bigger room than I’ve been accustomed to,” he said, with a shrug of his thin shoulders and a bitter smile.

“If you were more ashamed,” she said, trying to let condemnation get the stronger hold of her, “I should be more pleased. You are not ashamed; you are not silent.”

“Why should I be? To be found out is a blunder. I am annoyed, that’s all. I was a catspaw—in other words, a fool. Overent and Bladden both got off to Spain: £40,000 in the cab that took them to Victoria! What luck! I tell you, Pamela, the thought of those two fellows nearly drove me to suicide when I was in prison. But the game isn’t up——”

She gave a little scream; then, in a fright, put her hand on her mouth.

“But you’ll never again——”

“Pooh! my darling—business is business. Bogus company promoting is as honest a profession as—stock-broking, for example, or making a corner. Suppose the gold-fields, or diamond-fields, or petroleum-wells don’t exist—that’s business. If not, where is the use of fools? The small capitalist must have been created with some object.”

“You are hopeless. I dread to think of what the end may be. At all events”—she moved her head toward the door and tapped her foot softly on the floor—“you’ll leave him alone.”

“I’ll be a pattern. As for him—there is nothing left for me to do. I leave him entirely to you. Marry him. Perhaps you know a pretty girl with a little fortune who would suit me.”

She thought of Nancy, and immediately an unreasoning, murderous jealousy of that pink-faced, foolish thing took possession of her. She sat down on the low window-seat. The casement was hooked back, and the new shoots of ivy tickled her chin as she leaned out with a tired groan and looked down at the glistening garden. Then she pulled herself back to every-day detail with a jerk, and got up, saying that she would send him up what was necessary—brushes, soap, and so on. The room had not yet been prepared. The silk quilt was spread gauntly over a blanketless bed. Edred was looking at it and at the dim hangings with idle interest.

“You don’t often see a bed like this nowadays,” he said.

“It is a state bed, in a way. They were all born in it; they all die in it. Full of ghosts! I’d rather you slept in it than I.”

“I’m inured to them—the prison’s full. Not the ghosts of small capitalists who come wringing their hands for their swamped savings; only women and weaklings see ghosts of that kind. It was one ghost of lost opportunity—that tormented me; the ghost of £40,000 collared by Overent and Bladden, who were a shade more clever than I was.”

She took up a corner of the patchwork quilt.

“It is made,” she said dreamily, “from bits of wedding dresses. Each bride contributed her patches. It is a pretty idea—the people about here are full of fancies.”

“You’ll be contributing your patches before long,” he said airily. “By Jove! I, as only brother, must give you away. We never imagined that particular position in the old days, Pam.”

“I don’t admit it now.” She shook her pale head. “Oh, why did you come? Why am I fool enough to love you?”

“No heroics, dear. I’m fond of you—too fond to stand in your light. I won’t dispute that I’ve some regard for myself, too. Run away now and send me a few things. I want to make myself as decent as these confounded clothes will allow.”

She went away. Directly Jethro heard her foot on the stairs he called her, in a masterful way, just as if she already belonged to him.

He said, his face shining with hospitality and kinsmanship, how pleased he was. He spoke of driving Edred over to Turle that very day, but she negatived it as skillfully as she could. Then he spoke heartily of the wedding and of Edred’s opportune arrival. She was afraid that he meant to kiss her again; he seemed prone to hearty lover’s kisses, without considering mood or asking for permission. Nettie, bearing a steaming soup tureen, saved her.

The gong—one of her civilized institutions—was beaten. Edred came humming down the shallow stairs. The three took their seats at the low, narrow table—Jethro on the high master’s stool at one end, Pamela on the other, Edred modestly at the side.

Both men ate and talked heartily, Pamela childishly crumbled bread in her soup. When the meal was over she left them; decanters on the table, the smoke of tobacco mingling with the smoke from the fire. She went into the gay drawing-room and stretched flat on the sofa.

She looked at the trivial vanities which she had brought home so joyfully from Liddleshorn. She looked, as Gainah had looked, with somber eyes. Her life was wrecked too. She would never be the mistress of Folly Corner now.

Through the stout doors came the men’s laughter. Edred’s became more roystering as the minutes ticked on. She could hear in the intervals the steady stroke of the clock, the rumbling groan it gave before it delivered itself of the quarters.

Her arms were above her head, her widely-opened eyes looked across the hot purple furrows of the field. She could see a long way, over hedges, across copses. She saw stretches of pasture, dotted with cows; saw verdant fields of rye-grass; fields of turnips half devoured by sheep, which were shut in by hurdles.

The sun shone, the birds sang, one or two adventurous bees came in at the window. Every now and then that laugh of license, of reckless disregard, pierced the thick doors, and she blenched. She could no longer see the future.

[CHAPTER IX.]

AUNT SOPHY was giving her first garden party of the season—to her second-best set. That meant a family gathering, with the Jeremy Crisps left out. Maria Furlonger drew the line at the Jeremy Crisps, and said she did her duty to them as a relative by buying groceries at their father’s shop.

Edred was to go with Pamela. He was already a local favorite. He had all the qualities which commend themselves to country society. He could sing, play tennis, do conjuring tricks at the local entertainments.

Jethro wasn’t going; men with a serious occupation were never even asked. Aunt Sophy collected her men painfully; a town failure or so, who happened to be trying poultry farming or fruit culture—having tried everything else of which he knew anything whatever; the curate; one or two old gentlemen who had retired from something or the other, one or two young ones who admired a particular girl.

Pamela ran out to the barn before she started. Jethro was at the door, with a couple of half-bred retrievers at his heels and a trio of mongrel pups that he was training for sheep-dogs gamboling in the muck of the yard.

The vast proportions of the barn—the biggest and oldest for many miles round—were a fitting background for Jethro with his muscular frame and fair, sun-seared face. He was so English, so brown, so spare. There was nothing of the student’s pallor and stoop about him—no irritating subtlety. There was no furrow in his face, no ridge of superfluous flesh, no mark of painful thought. It was all tough muscle. Pamela looked at him admiringly, her desire going out to strength and health and simplicity of life and motive. The clean shocks of yellow straw in the barn, the dirty, trodden straw in the yard, agreed well with his blue checked shirt and tan waistcoat; with his voluminous checked tie, made in the time-honored rustic fashion. His father had worn such ties and his father before him. What had been seemly in “Old Jethro” was seemly in “Young Jethro”; that was the spirit of Folly Corner. It was a blue check tie made out of half a silk handkerchief, cut cornerwise and deftly folded into proper shape by the iron. His sleeves were rolled to the elbow, showing his delicately textured upper arm. He had been helping his men with some necessary job—he was a master, by heredity, of all the intricate sublime art of agriculture. She said:

“We are going now. I wish you could come too.”

As she spoke, a loud angry hiss came from behind the house. It was like the threatening bubble of a pot that is boiling too fast.

“Chalcraft is taking a starling’s nest,” Jethro said. “Tell Aunt Sophy I may be up after tea.”

He turned into the barn, through the dim shadow of which she could see two men, Peter Hone and another. She turned to go back through the yard, placing the points of her shoes carefully on the ground so that she might not soil above the toe-cap. Edred was leaning over the white paling and watching her gingerly progress with amusement.

“Beastly dirty place, isn’t it?” he said, sneering and glancing down at the trodden straw. “I say, what a jolly dance you could have in that great barn! Do you remember the dance I took you to at Westminster Town Hall?”

She nodded, hardly glancing at his slim, foppish figure. He was tinsel compared to Jethro—Jethro with his muscular arms bared amid the golden straw of his barn. She saw poetry in the vast gray place, with its dusty, murky rafters; to Edred it only suggested a subscription dance and Westminster Town Hall. For the moment she preferred Jethro, with his white strong throat.

They went down the road and through the wood, talking commonplaces. Edred had been nearly three months at Folly Corner, and one cannot for three months keep up the strain of a dramatic attitude. Pamela still had her moments of anguish, of struggle—but she no longer talked about those moments. She waited with turgid, stupid hopelessness for what the future might fling at her. She drifted; the matter had been taken completely out of her hands. She was—so she understood—to be married to Jethro directly the harvest was in: until the harvest was in, she allowed herself time to breathe. She was garnering up strength.

The woods were in their fullest flush of beauty. The anemones were widely blown, with the quiet watchfulness which comes before death. The heavy heads of the blue-bells were voluptuous. Here and there one caught the deep yellow of the oxlip; snowy stitchwork was a delicate groundwork to every leaf and flower.

No feet but their own disturbed the silence. Jethro was savage on the rights of property, and this was his land. No old woman might pick up sticks, no child gather wild-flowers in his preserves. They were small; he was fond of saying scornfully that he was a working farmer, not a rich yard-stick from London. He did not make pheasants the sole business of October, and what he shot he ate or gave away. The contents of his bag never went to market.

He had the grasping spirit of the farmer who flourished in the early years of the century, in the roaring times before Parish Councils and educated, supercilious cockneys, keen on rights of way. He would, when the opportunity occurred, put a padlocked, five-barred gate across a little-used public path. He cunningly inclosed wayside waste, doing it gradually; grubbing the old hedge, bringing his newly planted, carefully clipped one to the edge of the road. He honestly believed that he was doing a good act; in his view, all waste land was wasted land, and he would have had the Government parcel out the commons to farmers for redemption.

Edred kept his eyes on the ground and grumbled at the deep yellow ruts made in winter by timber wagons and horses’ hoofs. But Pamela forgot her dainty shoes, the edge of her new skirt, with the tiny frills. She looked ardently at every new beauty which slid before her eyes—bursting twigs, drifted blossom, dry, feathery fagots tied into bundles, little heaps of creamy wood chips; the hacked hedge-rows and banks, with the warm orange of the amputated tree-trunks.

It was early June. The day was so hot and dry that when they reached Turle they could see from the road that even careful matrons like Aunt Sophy were sitting about the big sloping lawn without even a shawl. They made little groups—like modern pictures of the ladies in the “Decameron.”

Nancy came running across the lawn, her heavy red-ringed croquet mallet in her hand. She had a loose flannel shirt and her cycling skirt with the big smoked pearl buttons at each hip.

“A cycling skirt always makes a girl look coarse,” Edred murmured critically.

Pamela gave him a pleased glance; she loved to hear him depreciate Nancy.

“Oh! do come and play!” cried the girl, addressing herself pointedly to Edred. “We are making up a fresh set. Croquet is such fun.”

Pamela, the thin stream of gall flowing from her heart, saw him return Nancy’s pleading, babyish glance tenderly. She turned away. She took Aunt Sophy’s effusive kiss without a word, only assuring her that she hadn’t a headache.

Egbert Turle, who had left Cambridge and was walking the hospital, nodded with patronage from his post by the tennis-net. He came dutifully to Turle every week.

Mrs. Clutton ran along the grass in her careless gown.

“Come and sit under the elms with me,” she said.

There were several ladies under the elms, in green wooden chairs with sloping backs. They had not come to play tennis or croquet; their sole aim was to talk scandal, snub people in the set a shade beneath their own, and drink astringent tea. They wore long skirts and elaborate light wraps, as distinguished from the athletic women a few paces off, who were running about and screaming to each other in the sun.

The earnest topic of the moment turned out to be false hair. Mrs. McAlpine had confessed to an increasing thinness on the left temple. Her doctor told her that she used the right side of the brain too much—and darkly hinted that she must go up to Lechaux—a hairdresser recommended by the ladies’ paper—and get a front. Annie Jayne cried out in earnest horror:

“Oh, don’t! My mother never wore false hair in her life. She took to caps when she was thirty-five. I shall take to caps myself in a year or two—they look matronly.”

“But no one wears caps nowadays,” cried Mrs. Clutton tersely. “Women buy false hair instead of lace. If, since the creation, each woman had done just as her mother did, fig-leaves would still be the height of fashion.”

Mrs. McAlpine, who had the greatest contempt for the journalist’s wife—she was a J. P.’s daughter and the widow of a Government official—broke out in her languidly genteel voice:

“I was afraid I should have been prevented from coming, dear Mrs. Turle. One can’t possibly attend a garden-party in a coat and skirt”; she looked complacently at her embroidered bodice, “and my lost box only turned up last night.”

The face of every lady immediately became solemnly sympathetic.

“I told you all about it, didn’t I? I’d been visiting at Warne—taking my best things, of course. The things, you know”—she gave a quick glance of her narrow eyes at Mrs. Clutton—“that one takes with one on a visit at a house where they are—well, rather particular. Dear Laura entertains so largely at Warne.”

One or two ladies on the edge of the second-best set looked at her with reverential alarm. Here was a person who visited on such positively equal terms at Warne, the biggest seat for miles round, that she called the hostess by her Christian name!

“I was in despair.” She flattened out her hands. “My box lost! My diamond comb and pendant, my jeweled girdle, a miniature set with diamonds that was given to my great-uncle by the Duke of Wellington, my ivory-backed brushes and silver toilet set—all the small, necessary trifles that one takes on a visit.”

“And you got them back?” asked a little lady breathlessly.

She was a shabby Jayne. Sophy did not often ask her to a garden-party, and she was feverishly voluble and deprecating in turn. She had a home-made blouse, with a funny tucker, and very new black kid gloves, the perfect palms of which she constantly displayed.

“I got it back,” Mrs. McAlpine said carelessly, giving the home-made blouse a look of amiable condescension. “But you may all imagine how I felt; one sets such store by one’s poor trifles.”

A massive girl, with a white gown, threw down her mallet as a member of the opposition clicked her ball against the stick.

“I can’t play any more; too slow,” she said. “I’ll tell somebody’s fortune instead.”

“My dear”—the dowdy Jayne cousin looked alarmed—“do you think that it is in quite good taste?”

She stopped with a jerk as Mrs. McAlpine said sweetly:

“Palmistry is all the rage just now in the best houses. Prejudice of any sort is so very middle-class. We had a professional palmist at Lady Clara’s last week, when I ran up to Grosvenor Gardens for her reception. She implored me to come; we are such very old friends.”

“Mother always thought it was best to ignore such things as fortune-telling, table-turning, scientific lectures, and anything unsettling,” Annie Jayne said simply. “I don’t think I’ll have mine told, Isabel.”

Half a dozen hands were held out. The girl in white went round phlegmatically.

She distributed journeys, legacies, surprises, and mishaps with equal calm. When it came to Mrs. Clutton’s turn she held out her pretty hand, a little coarsened by devotion to her neurotic fowls and her garden, with pretended nervousness. Isabel looked at it thoughtfully and murmured something about the lines not being very clear—a certain one, at least, confusing.

“Don’t say anything dreadful. Don’t tell me I’m going to be hanged; I’ve always had a foreboding that I shall be; and Tim—my husband, you know—used to say in his most savagely dyspeptic moments that I certainly deserved the fate.”

Isabel dropped the roughened hand suddenly.

“I can’t make out your fortune,” she said coldly. “There is no one else, is there? Yours is settled, Pamela. I’ll go and have a game of tennis, if Egbert will join—croquet’s duffing.”

She moved away in her statuesque fashion, her white skirt bellowing out in the May breeze. There was a sudden coldness and constraint. Even diplomatic Mrs. Turle looked vexed.

Mrs. Clutton made a mouth at Pamela, and said:

“Shall we go and have a look at Nancy’s flowers in the walled garden?”

They skirted the shrubbery, with its clumps of yellow berberis and laurustinus gone shabby. There was a swing between the double-flowered cherry trees; Nancy still used it—on rare occasions when she read fiction. Usually she was honestly intent on improving her mind. A thick volume lay face downward on the seat. Mrs. Clutton picked it up, read the title, and dropped the book with a gesture of distaste.

“Nancy shouldn’t be allowed to read that woman’s stories.”

“She is very popular.”

“She ought to lecture—‘for men only.’ However, Nancy won’t hurt; she won’t understand—half. She is a little more than shallow; all surface, like a dish—not even a well-dish. Nancy and Isabel Crisp—you know Isabel is staying here now that Egbert is down from the hospital—will read the same book. One reads a bit, puts in a marker; the other takes up the book, reads on from the marker, then puts it in where she leaves off. That’s how they get through. I’m fond of Nancy—she’s so picturesquely idiotic. Of course, she will marry your brother?”

Pamela dropped the almond-scented stalk of plum-colored wallflower which she had pulled and was sticking in her belt.

“I—I don’t know. Oh, no! I wouldn’t let him marry Nancy.”

Mrs. Clutton looked at her suspiciously.

She said meaningly, “There is one man in the world for you—Jethro Jayne. A woman has only to concern herself about her husband. Of course your brother will be cruel to Nancy in his own particular fashion. Some kick with their feet, some lash with their tongues—I prefer the former; they kiss a bruise, but no man’s lips can reach a woman’s heart. After all, he’ll make a better husband than that prig, Egbert Turle; he’s going to marry Isabel Crisp. He’s insufferable. He would divide the animal kingdom into four groups: the lower animals, hospital cases, human beings, and ’Varsity men. He talks of nothing but dissecting-rooms. He alludes constantly to the ‘laity.’”

Mrs. McAlpine’s genteel voice filtered through the shrubs.

“I knew the dear Duchess very well—in her maiden days. We visited at the same house in the Midlands.”

“That humbug! Her motto is ‘Who’s who?’ I don’t believe that she ever got farther than the housekeeper’s room at Warne. Some day, when I’ve bought enough oak and china, I’ll devote a little time to unmasking her. Tea will be served in half an hour. There’s dear Mrs. Turle going weightily toward the house to coach her three maids how to set cups.”

“Gainah is like that—or was before I deposed her. Cook did nothing but wash dishes.”

“You may sort women into two classes: those who can’t touch a chicken unless they’ve cleaned it themselves, and those who, if they are obliged to clean it, can’t eat it. Do come with me to Mrs. Hone’s—this way; through the gate, across the field, and into the Liddleshorn road. She has a Chippendale teatray which she has half promised to sell. We shall have plenty of time before tea.”

They went across the field, black-horned cattle following them curiously. Occasional cottages sparsely dotted the straight road leading to Liddleshorn. Two new ones, with vivid roofs of smooth tiles running up in conical shape to a chimney like an exaggerated pimple, had a blue metal plate lettered with white between the narrow doors.

“You are pretty safe in saying that every singularly ugly cottage is tenanted by the county police. Mrs. Hone lives at this next one with the bush of Jew’s mallow.”

They went in single file up the narrow flag path. Sheets of white candytuft crept coldly along the edge of the borders from the wooden gate to the door. In the little patch of kitchen garden row after row of cabbage with a blue bloom looked to Pamela like a generously flung out art carpet. The man at the best shop in Liddleshorn had shown her one just that shade. Straight ahead, across the railway bridge, a train shot past, the tails of smoke like drifting opal under the bright sun.

Mrs. Hone was hobbling about her garden.

“Poor old dear! She looks like a camel whose hump has slipped. Now, you must say nothing, look nothing—or you’ll spoil my bargain. Good-afternoon, Mrs. Hone. How’s the rheumatism?”

The sweet wrinkled face lifted and a thin voice said shrilly:

“It aint what you call rheumatism, ma’am; it’s paralism, that’s what I tells Dr. Frith.”

“You’re busy in your garden. I’ve been working very hard in mine. Your broad beans are in blossom. And you’ve planted out your French marigolds already.”

“Aye. But I doubt the frost ’ull nip ’em.”

She laughed; the pretty, brainless cackle of a very old woman—the light laugh something like a child’s and yet with the knell of decay in it.

“When I plants out they little seedlin’s I thinks o’ my children—all planted out; some in London, some on the hill. Some livin’ to blossom, some nipped by the frost. I’ve had thirteen, bless you! You’ll step inside?”

They went into the tiny living room, the strangely twisted mistress painfully leading the way. At a round table an old man sat at tea—bread, lettuce that had bolted, a handful of spring onions. The mahogany tray that Mrs. Clutton coveted was on a ledge beside the low-burning fire. The old wife stepped up to her husband and shook him none too gently by the shoulder, dropping her head at the same time, and shouting:

“Get up and let the ladies come to the fire.”

To them she added apologetically:

“He’s very old. I’m only seventy-eight, but he’s pretty nigh eighty. Deaf, too. I can’t make him hear—not when I wants him to do anything. I very offen say to him, ‘You don’t want to hear; you don’t want to hear, that’s what it is,’ I says.”

He turned round savagely at the touch of her hand on his shoulder and looked at the two women in light gowns on the threshold.

“What are you doing?” he demanded gruffly. “Damn it all, I means to have my tea.”

“He’s been one of those who lash and kick, too—the brute. And she such a sweet old fragrant thing! Never mind, Mrs. Hone; don’t you trouble to move, Mr. Hone; we should be sorry to disturb your tea.”

Mrs. Clutton squeezed round the other side of the table and took the tray in her hands. It was oval, cut out of the solid wood, and daintily inlaid with box.

“You’d sell this, Mrs. Hone?”

“The lady wants to know if we’ll sell the tray.”

“What’s she goin’ to give we for it?” he demanded sharply.

“Ten shillings!” screamed Mrs. Clutton.

“No, no! We couldn’t let it go for that. I thought fifteen.”

“Too much.” She put the tray back on the ledge.

He stuffed the last hunk of bread into his fierce old mouth, and spluttered out:

“Will you give twelve-and-six?”

“Well—yes. Is that settled?”

“You must settle with missus. I’m only a lodger.”

His eyes glittered at the half-sovereign she took from her purse and laid in Mrs. Hone’s hand.

“Yes, he’s only a lodger, as I often tells him when he’s tiresome. It’s my house. I was borned here—my brother left it me; he says, ‘You was borned here and you shall die here.’ My father built it and my brother added on this front room. His wife wanted to pull the old place down and put up a new; but he says, ‘No; what the father’s hands had put up the son’s should never pull down.’”

She kept laughing feebly and looking at them, from one to the other, with her dim eyes, deep in the web of seventy-eight years.

“It’s my cottage, and that’s why they won’t give me parish relief. It’s very hard. I ses to ’em, ‘I can’t fill my poor empty belly with bricks and mortar. An’ I am so fond of a bit of meat.’”

She was like a small child begging for sweets.

“Haven’t you any daughter to come in and look after you?”

“No. My daughter died fifty-five year ago. She was a pretty little gal. He’s my second husband, you know.” She nodded her head toward the deaf man, who, mollified by the gold, was munching vegetables like an amiable donkey. “My first husband died. He was coachman at Warne. When the new one come I was told to turn out of my nice cottage. So I married him. I couldn’t leave my nice cottage, could I, my dears? I was a silly gal and got married agen. I married the new coachman. That was before my brother died and left me this. If I’d known he was going to die and leave me this cottage when I was borned, I wouldn’t ha’ been a silly gal and got married agen. He was a dwarf, my brother. You come agen some day, and I’ll show you his trousers. I’ll show you my husband’s trousers, too. I got four shillin’s prize at the show last year for the best patch put on her husband’s trousers by an old woman over sixty. And I’m seventy-eight—there’s a difference! There did ought to be another class for them over seventy. I can use my needle. Mother always taught us to use our needles. The gals nowadays can’t put a shirt together.”

“Tea will be ready at Turle,” whispered Pamela.

“Yes. We must go. Good-by, Mrs. Hone; good-day, Mr. Hone. I’ll take the tray under my arm. Oh, don’t you bother about paper.”

They went down the uneven path with the stiff lines of snowy flowers.

“Poor old soul!” said Pamela, when they reached the road.

“Did she take you in with what she so eloquently calls her ‘poor, empty belly’? I left off being sentimental long ago. Mrs. Hone has a fat account in the post-office savings bank. I know that for a fact.”

“Shall we hurry a little? I hate to keep Aunt Sophy waiting, or to vex her. She didn’t like your remark about being hanged.”

“Of course she didn’t. Wasn’t it fun to see them petrify? No doubt they’ve been discussing me; saying what bad taste it was to set up a gallows-tree at a garden party. I give them endless topics for conversation. They don’t believe me even when I do tell the truth. There was a comic song Tim used to sing, ‘The only time I told the truth she said I was a liar.’ That is just my position. I tell the unvarnished truth: that my husband is a journalist traveling in search of sensation. They don’t believe me. If he were doing time at Portland and I said he was stalking big game, my social popularity would rival Mrs. McAlpine’s. Here’s your brother Edred coming across the meadow to look for us. He’s a very handsome man; not a bit like you. He reminds me of some splendid snake. Do you understand? As his sister, you won’t. You’ll only be shocked; there is a strong streak of the local prudery and orthodoxy about you, Pamela. I could go to destruction with a man of that type—hating him and myself all the time.”

[CHAPTER X.]

JETHRO was hoeing peas in the burning June sun. His white linen hat flapped over his calm, shrewd eyes. Pamela, loitering along the grass paths, marveled intolerantly at his choice of an occupation. Why should a man of substance, a man of birth, a man with acres and with laborers, hoe peas? She paced the paths thoughtfully, looking at her neat, broad border of new roses, taking up a fluttering label now and then to read the half-obliterated name. They were all the very latest and choicest roses, and had been planted in the spring by the nurseryman at Liddleshorn, to whom she had given a large order.

Her heart told her that Edred was close behind, and she turned, her eyes seeking his humbly, pleading for tender recognition. He did not trouble to look at her, but merely plucked one of her beautiful pink Verdier roses without permission, and stuck it in his coat, with a scornful laugh at its huge size.

Jethro, across his little heaps of flagging weeds and clods of yellow earth, watched the two gloomily. He was tired of Pamela’s elegant brother; he was suspicious, although he could not have explained why. His welcome to the shipwrecked stranger had been warm—it had even extended to a free drawing on his check-book; but he did not want his kinsman’s-hospitality to be construed into a life invitation. He remembered a funny story he had once heard about an engaging Irishman who had come on a month’s visit to a country house and stayed forty-five years. Edred had lamed his best horse; he had considerably reduced the cask of old whisky; he dipped too deeply into the tobacco-jar. He might stay until the wedding, and when that was over he must take himself off—to the West Coast of Africa, to another wreck, if he chose. The busy man, hoeing peas not because it was necessary but as a positive outlet for his energy, was heartily sick of the idle one, who strolled languidly along the rose border, the smoke from his cigar making a lean, blue string.

The wicket-gate creaked. Pamela looked up sharply. Heels clattered on the raised brick path, and a blithe voice called out, “Where are you all?”

“It’s Nancy.”

Edred moved forward so abruptly that he broke the long ash of his cigar, which he had been carefully preserving. Pamela followed. A tall, slim figure stood for a moment in the frame of the shining holly arch at the entrance of the garden. The sun caught Nancy’s masses of brick-red hair and enveloped her pretty face in flame. She called out to Jethro:

“Mother wants you to tell me how much you think she ought to get a load for her hay. Write it down, please, or I am sure to forget.”

She met Pamela at the beginning of the grass path. They kissed. Edred watched the tame little salute cynically. Then he took Nancy’s hand in the cycling glove with the perforated palm—like a thin crumpet—and watched her white lids fall. She was such a child that she never tried to hide her feelings.

Pamela dragged off a great branch of damask rose and tore her fingers.

“You should always cut roses,” Nancy said reprovingly, taking up a label. “Francesca Kruger—that’s flesh, tinged with saffron, isn’t it?”

“Copper,” returned Pamela curtly.

“I wish we could have some good roses. Evergreen isn’t successful with flowers. But he lets us have plenty of vegetables. I came to know if you would both come over to Malling Flower Show next Thursday. We could bike—that would be great fun, wouldn’t it? Mr. Meadows has asked me to judge the wild flowers, and I feel so horribly nervous. But I’ve been reading it up.”

“You can’t go to Malling,” Pamela said, looking sternly at the weak, radiant face, and hating Nancy all the more fiercely because her temples were so purely white, and because the ruddy hair grew round them so charmingly. “It’s lecture-day at Liddleshorn—the nursing lecture. It will be very interesting; we are going to bandage a small boy.”

“But I don’t care for the lecture. We are not going to finish the course. Annie says that her mother—Aunt Jerusha—thought scientific nursing a great mistake, and always said that no woman could expect to be a good nurse until she had been the mother of a large family and had buried two-thirds of it. You must come to Malling.”

She was speaking to Pamela, but her blue eyes were on Edred.

“I’ll come, anyhow,” he said lightly. “I’ll call at Turle about three. Will that do? Pamela would rather go to Liddleshorn and bandage her small boy.”

“That would be fun. And you’ll come into supper afterward. I must go now. Mother told me to look in at Hone’s—Nick Hone’s.”

“Where there are so many children?” asked Pamela, her gloomy eyes on the straight line of beauty afforded by her choice roses.

“No. Those are the Peter Hones. The Bert Hones live near us. But Nick Hone is a neighbor of yours. Jethro!” she called out shrilly, and he came across the rough, dry ground, hoe in hand, “do send poor Nick Hone in some new potatoes. You have plenty.” She glanced along the beds at the rows in white blossom. “He’s dying, and he keeps saying that if he had a dish of new potatoes he’d get better. Mrs. Hone went and dug some yesterday, but they were only as large as cob-nuts. Mother would have sent some, but Evergreen is a little touchy. He doesn’t like us to interfere with the vegetables.”

“Daborn shall take a trug full,” said Jethro carelessly. “Dying, is he? That’s drink. Never knew such a fellow! Three gallons of cider a day at harvest time wasn’t enough for him. The other men save some and take it home to their wives.”

“That is kind of you. Mrs. Hone will be so pleased. I’ll be off now. Three o’clock on Thursday, Mr. Crisp.”

He seemed amused by her adorable air of sheepishness when he took her hand. They all four went out into the inclosed garden, Jethro and Pamela dropping behind as a matter of course—his eyes on her, and hers fixed blankly on the well-cut back of Edred’s coat. Jethro picked up a flat wooden basket, with pieces of wood at the bottom like the rockers of a cradle. It stood by a row of early peas.

“Here’s a trug. Daborn shall take it to Hone when he goes home to dinner. Here, Daborn!”

He put his earthy, hard hand to his mouth and shouted. Pamela saw the man hurrying from the greenhouse, where he was getting young tomato plants ready for planting out. She followed Nancy and Edred, dreading to leave them alone for a moment, despising herself for dreading. They had just passed through the holly hedge. She scurried after, not knowing why she put her feet so softly on the gravel and coaxed her skirt close to her limbs so that it should not brush the box edging. When she stood in the frame of the arch she stopped. Her clear, jealous eyes went straight across the garden, across the bed of newly-planted cauliflowers which Chalcraft had been allowed to dibble in for the last time—next year she would have a lawn and carriage-drive. She looked across the brick path, through the tall heads of June flowers, to the umbrella yew-tree beneath which Gainah’s lilies were blooming.

They were standing behind it, between the thick foliage and the square lattice of the dining-parlor window. She saw Edred peer through to see if the room was empty. She saw Nancy, her head down, her arms and hands jerking, pretending to admire the lilies—bemoaning, in her imbecile way, no doubt, because Evergreen would not let her have lilies too.

They were very close together in the bosky kindness of the yew; no doubt it had been a witness to many like scenes and been discreet. Nancy seemed to sway a bit nearer the lithe figure in gray. Pamela saw his face and her heart came to a startled stop. He had looked like that when he kissed her for the first time—on the stairs of the boarding-house. It had been the first man’s kiss of her life.

Nancy’s eyes and cheeks and lips blazed like her ruddy hair. He pulled her toward him with the easy, insolent air of a man who is sure of his woman—who has been sure of women all his life—and kissed her on lids, lips, brows.

Pamela, wearing a white cotton gown, her head bare, looked like statue—one of the statues that used to decorate old gardens. She forgot everything—her approaching marriage and magnificence, her border of tea roses, the carriage-drive, her wedding clothes—all the big and little things which equally made her happiness or misery. For the first time for many months she seemed to touch her past self. She had almost forgotten, in the new strong life, the old one of dull days, and sloppy streets, and shop-windows, and a struggle for the latest fashion at the least possible cost. She was again that sharp-witted girl in Bloomsbury, that wildly wretched one who used to take omnibus in spare hours just to stand on the common and stare hungrily at a wall.

He was kissing Nancy; he meant to marry her. She couldn’t let him do that. She must abandon Jethro. Her life must run side by side with Edred’s. She didn’t care what sort of life—one of poverty, hard work, hard words; blows, perhaps. One of guilty prosperity, winding up with the prison again for him. It didn’t matter—so long as they were together, if only for a little. He didn’t love her. He wasn’t capable, as she knew love. But she loved him, even when she saw him stoop again to those red pouting lips behind the yew. All her rage was for Nancy.

Daborn came behind with the trug full of yellow-skinned potatoes. She stepped back and watched him go through the yard, and presently watched Nancy go down the bricked path, mount her bicycle, and skim away like a light swallow. Nancy had forgotten the marked quotation for hay. She could not carry two ideas in that limited head of hers.

The world was too gay and warm for Pamela’s blank misery. The hot sun darted into her strained eyes like needles. She went round the house, hugging the lichened wall, her head down, the woolly leaves and spiral tendrils of the vine touching her dull hair. At the garden door she met Gainah, with a flush on her wasted face and a gleam of the old industry and importance in her cold eyes. She was attired in a loose garment of unbleached calico, cut like an antiquated bathing garment. Her skirts were bunched under it. She had a battered straw hat, round which was firmly fixed a veil of green net. A pair of old stockings were pulled over her hands and arms. She carried a tin frying-pan, which she constantly beat with a long iron skimmer.

The air was hot and noisy. There seemed an unusual commotion along the line of beehives which were set by the south wall. They were straw skeps, which in winter were covered with turf to keep out the cold. Pamela, who had read up bee-keeping, with other branches of country life, had long decided to have bar-frame hives when she was mistress of Folly Corner. But her knowledge of bees was only theoretical. She was very frightened of them, and the deft, fearless way in which Gainah would take a swarm excited her admiration and made her grudgingly admit that it might be a point of superiority.

The angry buzzing grew louder, the monotonous tom-tom beating of the frying-pan and skimmer more persistent.

“There’s a swarm over there in the crab-tree,” Gainah said excitedly, forgetting for the time all party feeling. “I must go and take it. They know me. They’ve been talking all the morning; I knew we should have a flitting by dinner-time.”

Pamela languidly turned her head. A dark, pear-shaped mass hung from the lower branch of the crab tree in the oat-field.

“They know I’m coming,” Gainah said, advancing and still beating, “they know everything. These are fierce—I crossed them with an Italian queen ten years ago—but they never sting me. They have more sense and feeling than half the folk about. When old Bert Hone died and young Bert took the bees from his mother, they didn’t flourish. He hadn’t acted fair and they knew it. When there’s a swarm in the thatch none of the girls in a house ever get married. All Len Daborn’s girls are maids still.”

She strode on, a spare distorted figure in her calico wrapper, with the green veil tucked safely down in her scraggy throat. Pamela watched her vanish and reappear beyond the fruit-bushes. On any other day she might have asserted herself—given a wise homily on bee-keeping up to date, or deprecated old-world superstitions.

She went under the low door with the wooden hood and sat down in the dull dining-parlor, her eyes vaguely looking out of the window at the space between the casement and the yew. Nancy’s flame-colored hair and thick scarlet lips seemed to stand out in relief from the curled somber leaves.

Gainah’s work, just as she had thrown it down when the bees swarmed, was huddled on the floor, and the blue cambric hearts which she had cut ready for patching on the white dimity were dotted like huge pale turquoises on the narrow oak table.

Pamela looked at the half-made quilt. Gainah had told her once, in a moment of expansiveness, that the blue cambric and white dimity had been her mother’s wedding petticoat and gown. It was a dainty quilt, all white groundwork, with blue bordering and bands and carefully cut hearts and leaves. The stitches were small and regular. Gainah sat at patchwork from breakfast until supper, now that the garden and the house were no longer under her control. In the lower drawer of her chest she already had five quilts folded neatly away in camphor.

The front door opened. Edred came in, rang the hand-bell on the table in the passage. Pamela heard voices—a little deprecating cackle, a man’s voice subdued to a cautious bass growl. Unable to bear any more, she started up, threw back the door, and advanced into the passage. As she did so, the deep rose-color of Nettie’s cotton gown whisked out of sight into the kitchen. She went, her head high on her throat, into the drawing-room, and Edred followed.

Fate seemed to decide that her moments of decided comedy or tragedy should be played in that room: the room with the ugly grate and marble mantelpiece which Jethro’s father had put in to make the place smart for Gainah; with the painted milking-stools and fretwork brackets and cheap embroideries which she had herself brought from Liddleshorn.

The roses in the blue bowls were drooping, candle-grease had dropped on to the keys of the piano, the open door of the china closet displayed dusty shelves and a floor on which the gay red-and-blue rugs were kicked up. Pamela saw these things; they reminded her sharply of the change that of late had come over her. She no longer took a housewifely pride in anything; her life was occupied in playing cat, with Nancy and Edred for mice.

“Are you going to marry Nancy?” she asked abruptly.

“Are you going to marry Jethro?” he returned aptly.

“I—I suppose so. And yet, when it comes to the point—— Everything depends on you.”

She looked at him again in an appealing way.

“We’re in a bit of a mess,” he said, shrugging his thin shoulders and impatiently pulling the fine points of his black mustache.

She hunched her shoulders and clenched her hands between her knees as if she were in actual physical pain.

“Oh! why did you come?” she moaned.

“Nonsense. It was very fortunate for me. I couldn’t have kept on with sewing-machines—cut my throat, rather. And you can’t execute a coup of any kind without capital. This sort of thing isn’t permanent, of course. Old Jeth’s getting sick—he’s a good fellow. Men of that type always show their feeling in mean ways. He ought to swear at me, kick me out—he only looks blue when I fill up my glass. I must either marry Nancy—it can’t make any difference to you, Pam—or I must get a couple of hundred to set me up in life again. There are lots of good things going in the City—beastly nuisance not seeing the evening papers. My head is full of ideas. If I had a couple of hundreds I could turn them into thousands in a week. Balaclavas have run up to——”

“Don’t talk to me about stocks; I don’t understand—and it is so unimportant——”

“By Jove! it’s all-important to me.”

She straightened her curved back. He saw a convulsive lump working in her throat, and the rims of her lids grew faintly pink. He frowned. She was going to cry. A woman’s tears lashed him to any sort of brutality.

“When I saw you kiss Nancy,” she broke out, “it nearly killed me.”

“So you saw! But when old Jeth kisses you, in his open, whole-hearted, smacking fashion?”

“It doesn’t affect you. Men are different—and you more different than any other man,” she said confusedly.

“This sort of thing doesn’t help us,” he cried impatiently. “Which shall it be? Turle, with Nancy as a wife and Aunt Sophy as a mother-in-law, or London, with two hundred pounds in my pocket?”

“I haven’t fifty pounds.”

“But Jethro has. Get it out of him; you’ll do it better than I should. Go to him frankly; say I’ve a scheme for making a fortune. He will be delighted to get rid of me. He’s suspicious, without knowing why, poor chap. This brother and sister humbug is the merest farce. If these people were not fools, the most generous, gullible fools in the world, they would have found us out long ago.”

He crossed to the sofa, threw himself beside her, and laxly hooked his long arm round her firm waist.

“Get me the couple of hun, Pam,” he said tenderly, “and I’ll be off. Nancy is a pretty imbecile. I’ll go to town. I’ll keep out of mischief, sail just within the wind—don’t bother your dear anxious head about me. Marry old Jeth; cut a figure in the neighborhood. With his money and your brains you can be county swells.”

“And you?”

“I told you—don’t worry. Forget No. 4658.”

She started nervously.

“How can you think of that time without a shudder? Even now, when I go to sleep at night, the prison wall shoots up and blinds me. Yet you—were inside. And you say that number—the number that was you—without a tremor. I’m afraid to let you go. It will happen again.”

“Not if I know it. I was green. Overent and Bladden victimized me. Only fools are found out. Sin is a short name for stupidity. I shall never overshoot the mark again. There are fifty ways—five hundred—of making a fortune. No man but a fool need work—in these commercial days. Milligan cleared fifty thousand only last week, just by buying a concern and turning it into a company. He’s a prominent man, a politician, a baronet. Ten years ago he kept a newspaper and sweetstuff shop at Hornsey. Lady Milligan, whose drawing-room gowns are sketched in the fashion papers, boiled toffee and sold it in pennyworths. No one calls Milligan a blackguard.”

“He must have swindled somebody. It’s impossible else.”

“Of course he did. But everybody swindles everybody else—that’s the commercial spirit; it has made us a great nation.”

“Jethro——”

“Was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He is a fool; without his inheritance, he’d be plowing and hay-making. Why discuss idly and waste time? The dinner gong will sound soon.”

He took out his watch. It was a costly gold hunter, which he had bought in his brief prosperous time. He had put it in her hands only half an hour before his arrest—when Overent and Bladden had flown with forty thousand pounds and he was madly packing his bag in the Bloomsbury back bedroom.

“What am I to do?”

“Get two hundred pounds out of Jethro. I will go away and make my fortune. Some day, when you read the papers—a day old,” he sneered, “you’ll see my name as chairman of a public dinner, or recipient of a testimonial. I mean to be generous—when generosity can be made to pay. I’ll present my district with a public library, a clock tower, or a drinking fountain, and be knighted.”

“You’ll come to Folly Corner sometimes?”

“Never.” Even his honor, just because he was a man, was stronger than hers. “I thought at first that it would work—you as Jethro’s wife, I as Nancy’s husband. But you are one of those emotional women who go to the devil and drag a man with them. When I leave here it will be for good. You won’t even know my address.”

“I couldn’t bear it.”

Her eyes were not on him, but on the lattice. She looked across the great field, with its uplands and its belt of oaks. She had seen it in so many aspects—half shorn; plowed, the wet furrows shining like glass; seen it smoothly iced with January snow; watched the green needle-points of young grain. That outlook, that deep bay window, had known the tearing of her heart.

She looked. The ripeness of harvest was suggested. There were the long stretches of gray-green grain, soon to be golden, soon to rustle with the dry, hot breeze of August. She saw the tossed-up lavish boughs of wild roses wreathing above the hedge-rows, and saw the long grass on the banks, tropical in its growth, and going rapidly to seed.

She couldn’t stay here and watch the changes of the season for years—year after year and then death—without word of him.

“I couldn’t bear it,” she repeated.

“You wouldn’t be fool enough to throw Jethro over? You wouldn’t come with me to London and take pot luck—a knight’s wife some day, perhaps, or only the starving wife of—a number. I mean to be careful—but failure’s on the cards. Even men like Milligan come a cropper now and then. I’ve heard shaky stories about him. He doesn’t know when to stop.”

His eyes were shining. Something of the old passion was stamping itself anew on his face. She was looking lovely—the daredevil expression of perfect abandonment and sacrifice strong on her mouth, on her quickly-breathing body, on the very hands which shook in the lap of her white gown.

“You wouldn’t come?” he said, under his breath.

She gave a quick sigh, a last sharp glance at the gray, gently-moving uplands and the wreaths of dog-roses.

“I would go with you—anywhere. I would have gone with you to the prison, been a number, a thing less than an animal behind the prison wall—but they wouldn’t let me.”

He put his mouth to hers.

“Dear little woman! In India you’d go to the Suttee. Then it is settled. Tackle Jethro to-night.”

Folly Corner