I was now confronted with my own particular purpose, the one I had bargained with myself to carry out; I turned it over and over in my mind, and though by the light of reason I could perceive no solution to the obvious difficulty presented, yet my curious instinct persisted, that all would be well. I was certain that my purpose was a good one. I contemplated a Malory changed, softened, hardened, sobered, steadied, by the red-hot furnace of war; he had called himself an inconstant man; I felt that he would be now no longer inconstant. I contemplated a Ruth intolerant, after her four years lived in liberty, of her former bondage. I saw them fuse, in my own mind, in mutual completion.
In the meantime, Westmacott stood ominously in the centre of the road.
I heard first of his return from Amos, as I stood with Mrs. Pennistan watching the folding of the sheep. Amos had brought the sheep with him in a cart from Tonbridge market; he was taciturn while he turned them out from under the net into the hurdled fold, but when the hired man had driven away the lumbering cart, he said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder,—
“Wife, who d’you think I met on the road yonder?”
She stared at him, and he added, in his laconic way,—
“Rawdon.”
“He’s back?” she said, dismayed.
Amos expanded.
“Ay. They’ve a system for bringing them home, it seems, according to their employ: farmers and food producers come first.”
“Then Malory,” I said involuntarily, “will come among the last lot as a man of no occupation.”