"What of it?" the man repeated. "You lend them youngsters money and then you come to me, a man who's been on this land for twenty-two years, and you've nothing to say but 'get out!' Where am I to find another farm at my time of life? Just answer me that, will you?"
"It is not my concern," Jane declared. "I only know that I decline to have any tenants on my property who do not do justice to the land. When I see that they do justice to it, then it is my wish that they should possess it. It is true that I have lent money to some of the farmers round here, but the greater part of what they have put down for the purchase of their holdings is savings,—money they had saved and earned by working early and late, by careful farming and husbandry, by putting money in the bank every quarter. You've had the same opportunity. You have preferred to waste your time and waste your money. You've had more than one warning you know, Crockford."
"Aye, more than a dozen," Segerson muttered.
The man looked at them both and there was a dull hate gathering in his eyes.
"It's easy to talk about saving money and working hard, you that have got everything you want in life and no work to do," he protested "It's enough to make a man turn Socialist to listen to un."
"Mr. Crockford," Jane said, "I am a Socialist and if you take the trouble to understand even the rudiments of socialism, you will learn that the drones have as small a part in that scheme of life as in any other. You have a right to what you produce. It is one of the pleasures of my life to help the deserving to enjoy what they produce. It is also one of the duties, when I find a non-productive person filling a position to which his daily life and character do not entitle him, to pull him up like a weed. That is my idea of socialism, Mr. Crockford. You will leave on March 25th."
They rode homeward into a gathering storm. A mass of black clouds was rolling up from the north, and an unexpected wind came bellowing down the coombs, bending the stunted oaks and dark pines and filling the air with sonorous but ominous music. The hills around soon became invisible, blotted out by fragments of the gathering mists. The cold sleet stung their faces. Out on the moors was no sound but time tinkling of distant sheep bells.
"There's snow coming," Segerson muttered, as he turned up his coat collar.
"It won't do any harm," she answered. "The earth lies warm under it."
The lights of Parracombe, precipitous and unexpected, were like flecks in the sky, wiped out by a sudden driving storm of sleet. A little while later they cantered up the avenue to Woolhanger and Jane slipped from her horse with a little sigh of relief.