"He's safe on the moor with Alderson looking after the sheep, and he's safe in the cowshed milking the cows; but he isn't safe when Ned drives into Reyburn market."
"Would it be safer in Canada?"
"Yes. He'd be thirty miles from the nearest pub. He'd be safer here if you didn't give him money."
"The boy has to have money to buy clothes."
"I could buy them."
"I daresay! You can't treat a man of thirty as if he was a baby of three."
She thought. "No. You can only treat a woman…. 'There is one eternal thinker'—"
A knock on the door.
"There," her mother said, "that's Dan."
Mary went to the door. Ned Alderson stood outside; he stood slantways, not looking at her.