Then she turned and approached Mrs Sweetland.
“My place is in his home, mother. Don’t you fear nothing. I’ll be a good wife to your son, an’ a good daughter to you. Our Dan be in the hands of God. Good-bye, all—good-bye.”
She drove away, and the men who had hissed at her husband cheered her.
“Dammy—a good pucked un!” cried a thin, gnarled figure with a green shade over his eye. “Lucky’s the he that gets that she, whether it be yon chap or another after he swings!”
The man was called Rix Parkinson, and he held the proud dual position of leading drunkard and leading poacher in Moreton. He was drunk now, but people nearly always found themselves in agreement with him when he was sober and cared to talk.
A buzz and babel turned round Mrs Maine and the Sweetlands. Then the gamekeeper and Titus Sim talked apart.
“There’s a train to Newton Abbot half after six,” said Matthew. “I’ll go by it an’ have a tell with Lawyer Jacobs.”
“And what I can do with Mr Henry I will do,” said Sim.
His eyes were upon Minnie Sweetland’s carriage as it drove away with the little blue figure sitting bravely in it—alone.