Then she flamed, struck to the root of the matter and left him.
"If the fact that you're engaged to me, by every sacred tie of honour, ruins your credit—then tell yourself what you are," she said, and her voice rose to a note he had never heard before.
This time he did not call her back, but went his own way up the hill.
CHAPTER XIII
IN THE FOREMAN'S GARDEN
Mr. Best was a good gardener and cultivated fruit and flowers to perfection. His rambling patch of ground ran beside the river and some of his apple trees bent over it. Pear trees also he grew, and a medlar and a quince. But flowers he specially loved. His house was bowered in roses to the thatched roof, and in the garden grew lilies and lupins, a hundred roses and many bright tracts of shining, scented blossoms. Now, however, they had vanished and on a Saturday afternoon John Best was tidying up, tending a bonfire and digging potatoes.
He was generous of his treasures and the girls never hesitated to ask him for a rose in June. Ancient Mrs. Chick, too, won an annual gift from the foreman. Down one side of his garden ranged great elder bushes, and Mrs. Chick made of the blooth in summer time, a decoction very precious for throat troubles.
Now Best stood for a moment and regarded a waste corner where grew nettles. Somebody approached him in this act of contemplation and he spoke.
"I often wonder if it would be worth while making an experiment with stinging nettles," he said to Ernest Churchouse, who was the visitor.
"They have a spinnable fibre, John, without a doubt."