What did anything matter?
It was good land. What nonsense that writer person talked all about handing over property to the State to be run by syndicates of working men. As though just anyone could farm who thought it would be rather nice to walk about and watch the crops grow! Why, a hundred years ago this height of the wold had been covered by gorse and short-cropped turf. The sixty-acre and its neighbouring fields were still known as the "Sheep Walk." To produce this fertile soil her grandfather and her father and John had marled and manured and watched and waited as though nothing else in the world was of any importance. Even in her own day hundreds of tons of burnt chalk must have been scattered on the hill-side to make those turnips swell so gallantly.
Mr. Rossitur, if you please, thought the land was easy to own. Mary wanted to tell him that to care for it as she cared one had to give up everything—even the chance of ever hearing anyone say something more intelligent than "Page 121!"
From the other side of the hedge rose a sharp cry, half pain, half terror.
Mary looked at the thick interlacing of hawthorn, but could see nothing. Then came voices—a man's hoarse and angry, a boy's shrill with fear.
She began to run along the uneven road.
The hedge was broken by a strip of fence across the stump of a tree. Beyond, near a "pie" of turnips, stood a half-filled cart. Near it, crouching in the road, knelt the boy, Jack Greenwood, whom Mary had prematurely wrested from the Council School. Bending over him, with a short whip in his hand, stood Waite, the beast man.
"Stop that! What are you doing, Waite?" called Mary. She climbed the fence with greater speed than elegance, slipping a little on the damp wood.
The man looked up, with surly defiance.
"I warn't doing nowt, Mrs. Robson. This lad's an idler. He needs a bit o' stick now and then to keep him up ti'd mark."