“‘You have taught me a great deal. I have learnt from you what men like Leslie Dymock have a right to expect from life.’
“‘And you will give it him?’ I asked.
“She bowed her head.
“‘I will try.’
“Now I thought that a very satisfactory conversation, and I went about my work, for beasts must be fed and housed, weddings or no weddings, with a singing heart that day. If, somewhere, a tiny worm of jealousy crawled about on the floor-mud of my being, I think I bottled it very successfully into a corner. I was not jealous of Dymock on account of Ruth; no, not exactly; but jealous only as one must be jealous of two young happy things when one remembers that, much as one values one’s independence, one is not the vital life-spark of any other human being on this earth. There must be moments when the most liberty-loving among us envy the yoke they fly from.
“I clapped a cow on her ungainly shallow flanks as I tossed up her bedding, and said to her, ‘You and I, old friend, must stick together, for if man can’t have his fellow-creatures to love he must return to the beasts.’ She turned her glaucous eye on me as she munched her supper. Then I heard voices in the shed.
“‘Rawdon! if dad sees you....’
“And Westmacott’s hoarse voice.
“‘I’ll chance that, but, by hell, Ruth, you shall listen to me. They think you’re going to marry that lout, but as I’m a living man you shan’t. I’ll murder him first. I swear before God that if you become that man’s wife I’ll make you his widow.’
“I stood petrified, wondering what I should do. It was night, and pitch dark inside the shed, but as I looked over the back of my cow down the line of stalls in which the slow cattle were lazily ruminating, I saw two indistinct figures and, beyond them, the open door, the night sky, and an angry moon, the yellow Hunter’s moon, rising behind the trees.