‘What’s up with your maid?’ Williams asked. ‘I reckon I’ve shocked her. Did I say anything out of the way?’
‘Not you! She’s a rum ’un is Marion,’ Mr Prosser laughed.
And a few days later she had met Abner returning from his fruitless visit to The Dyke.
She had looked at him standing bare-headed in the level sunshine, and seen that he was well-favoured, but when she pulled up her horse and emerged from the dream state into which the rhythm of trotting hoofs had thrown her she had not thought that this meeting would be different from any other with a labourer out of work. She liked Abner’s face, and for this reason had taken the trouble to ask him where he lived. Then came the word ‘Wolfpits,’ and a sudden realisation that Fellows was the name that Mr Williams had mentioned in his scandalous tale. It thrilled her to find herself face to face with Mary’s lover. She lowered her eyes, not daring to look at him, and all the time her soul was consumed with a curiosity to see more of him, to find out what he was like. She knew that this curiosity was dangerous, that she was deliberately courting temptation, but she had had enough of prudence and felt that she was old enough to look after herself. And yet she knew that she had done a momentous thing when she told him to call next morning at The Dyke, and feared that trouble, indefinite trouble, might come of it.
Abner had not been working three days on the farm when Harris, his principal labourer, told Mr Prosser who the new workman was: ‘Young Mrs Malpas’s fancy man,’ he called him; and Mr Prosser, who set great store on the respectability of his farm, felt that he had made a mistake in employing him. The matter had been settled by Marion. No doubt if she had known all the circumstances of the case she would not have taken him on.
‘Do you know who this young chap is, Marion?’ he asked.
‘Yes. He comes from Wolfpits.’
‘Do you realise that he’s the chap Williams was talking about, the one that’s living with Mary Malpas?’
‘Yes, I do. Mr Williams himself said he didn’t blame her.’
‘I thought you yourself were put out a bit by his mentioning it.’