"No."
"Why?"
"I don't know, Alfie. I ain't never spoken to him, nor him to me. 'Tis his face, I suppose."
"Mother thinks he's a danger to me."
"Gracious!"
"William moves with the times, a far-seeing man. And snug, with money in bank and credit, too. Mother says he's after my business. I got ahead by buying my motor-'bus. Yes—William Saint might have sneaked my good business. He knows folk far and wide, as I do. That's bread and cheese to a carrier. And he knows how to tickle 'em with pleasant words. That's cakes and ale."
He said no more. Fancy felt vaguely troubled. She had taken Alfred's profitable business for granted. Fellow-servants and villagers had assured her, with a sub-acid inflection underlying congratulation, that she was lucky indeed to have got so warm a man as the carrier. Like most of her class, she entertained nebulous ideas about how money was made, although she had been constrained all her life to use such money as came to her thriftily and with a very lively sense of its elusive attributes in slipping through careless fingers. The slow building-up of a business had never engrossed her thoughts. But she knew well enough, poor child, how rapidly such a business may disintegrate, and fall to pieces. That calamity had been her father's bitter experience.
They followed the Avon, strolling leisurely up-stream till they reached a small covert much beloved by hunting-men because it always harboured a stout fox.
"Let's go in wood," said Alfred.
"Won't it be damp, dear?"