'I'll do no 'ooman's will!' said Vessons.
'Look here, Vessons! Be reasonable. Listen to me. I'm your master, aren't I?'
'Ah! Till a month.'
'Well, you take orders from me; that's all that matters. I'm master here.'
The tones of his ancestry were in his voice—an ancestry that ruled over and profited by men and women as good as themselves, or better.
'So we'll say no more about it,' he finished, with the frank and winning smile that was one of his few charms.
Vessons stared at him for some time, and, as he stared, an idea occurred to him. It was, he felt, a good idea. It would enable him to keep his swan and his self-respect and to get rid of Hazel. As he pondered it, his face slowly creased into smiles. He touched his forelock—a thing only done on pay-days—and withdrew, murmuring, 'Notice is took back.'
They saw him go past the window with the steps and the shears, evidently to attend to the swan.
Reddin thought how easy it was to manage these underlings—a little authority, a little tact. He turned to Hazel, crying in the high armchair of black oak with its faded rose-coloured cushions. She was crying not only because Vessons had come off victorious, but because her position was now defined, and was not what she would have liked, but also because Reddin's manner to her jarred after last night.
Last night, in the comfortless darkness of Hunter's Spinney, he had seemed for a little while to be a fellow-fugitive of hers, one of the defenceless, fleeing from the vague, unknown power that she feared. Then she had pitied him—self-forgetfully, fiercely—gathered his head to her breast as she so often gathered Foxy's. But now he seemed to have forgotten—seemed once more to be of the swift and strong ones that rode down small creatures.