"Do they pull down his fences?" Terry demanded over his shoulder; he had been looking at that marvellous fireplace again.
"I don't think so. As a matter of fact they're building his house for him.—By the way—Sheard's told me very little about it—have you bought your land to build on?"
Terry, remembering his Syndicate, had a momentary check.—"I don't know yet," he confessed.
"Because if you have," the Squire continued, "and find them employment—spend money in the place—and use a certain amount of tact—you might hit it off with them. But do try to overlook their Chapels. A soul's sometimes saved under a tin roof, you know."
Terry looked as if he would far rather have his soul damned under a Gothic nave.—"That's simply buying 'em off," he said. He would have preferred to burn them, each at one of the stakes they had uprooted.
"Well.... I'm afraid it's all the advice I can give you.—And now I shall have to ask you to excuse me. I'll show you a rather fine carved kingpost before you go if you like——"
And Terry presently departed for Porth Neigr again, where he took the taste of the Chapels out of his mouth in a further ecstatic contemplation of the early sixteenth-century rood-screen.
The fences were set up again.
John Willie Garden could never be sufficiently grateful to his stars that what happened next came before he departed for school again. He had gone to bed that night, but was lying awake, thinking of the suspended building. He knew that the resumption of that building was not irremediably involved in the fencing dispute; Edward Garden had established a serviceable goodwill in Llanyglo; and that very night, standing by Pritchard's manure-heap, Dafydd Dafis had all but told John Willie that when Llanyglo had settled with the intruder it would have time to spare for the child of its adoption again. He had told him this, and had then ruffled up John Willie's fair hair with his hand and had added that it was ten o'clock and time he was in bed.
His little window, as well as that of the next room, where his mother slept, overlooked the sandhills, and John Willie, lying awake, did not at first notice the change in its colour. Neither did his ears hear at first a low muffled cracking that had been going on for some time. But suddenly he sat up. The muslin curtains and the claywashed embrasure of the window had a rusty glow, which reached the counterpane of the bed in which John Willie lay.