FOLLY CORNER

THE steam of that stifling London day rose up in a choking, enervating haze from the hot grass. The shrill cries of children, loose from the Board School, cut the thick air. A train rushed across the bridge. Two or three cyclists tinkled their bells irritably as they spun down Wood Lane to the Uxbridge Road, leaving a cloud of gray grit behind them. Omnibuses pulled up at the corner of the short street near the few newly-built shops. From Portobello Road came the heavy rumble of more traffic, mixed with the nearer shout of costers vending dried fish and over-ripe fruit.

She was a young woman. She stood still, in a limp, hopeless attitude, her face turned on Wormwood Scrubbs, her strained eyes vacantly fastened on the buildings, spires, and chimneys in the distance.

Some simple sound from the frowning prison on her left made her turn her head with the swift, watching movement of a cat. But there was nothing to see; no hint, no hope. Behind those walls! Her throat, rising white and firm from the tumbled collar of the cotton blouse, contracted. Those walls! those impenetrable walls! those relentless walls!

She put out two hands in baggy gloves; she held them up, flat palms upward, toward the speechless prison. Her attitude was one of strong appeal, of hope, almost—as if she half expected that despair would work a miracle. They stretched out, big, strong, shapeless in the old gloves—those quivering, appealing hands of hers.

With a sharp agonized movement of the wrists she let her hands drop nervelessly to her side. A sob was strangled in her throat; she turned her head abruptly, so that her eyes no longer rested on the walls. With a sudden impulse she started running across the grass; ran across the road and under the bridge to the spot where an omnibus was waiting.

It grew dusk as she rattled back on the garden-seat to London. One by one the lights of night gleamed out. The life of night began. She looked down and saw the interior of smoothly rolling carriages, with women in evening dress lying idly back inside. Women on foot, smartly clad and with happy faces, flitted along the white pavements. Women clambered to the top of the omnibus, chattering and tittering. The one who sat next her glanced curiously at her grim mouth and shadowed eyes.

The lights grew thicker; fantastic chains of light—red and yellow. London glittered like some fairy mine of jewels: jewels already cut and polished, every facet gleaming. Words winked out letter by letter, then vanished. She saw them come and go on the fronts of the houses. OX FORCE—NINON SOAP—DUNN’S NOSTRUM. To her strained senses they lost all common meaning and symbolized the weird, the threatening, the unknown.

*****

It was blinding hot in the market town that Wednesday. Sheep straggled into the pens; the drovers choked and cursed as the dust dried in their throats. A smart trap, driven by a girl, with a groom behind, bowled down the High Street, leaving behind an impression of coolness and smartness. Now and again a sharp, imperious cycle-bell cut the air, and as some female cyclist darted by pedestrians heard the soft flutter of sleeves, like the flapping sails of a yacht.

A man came, with a slightly rolling walk, down the street. He made an imperial progress, nodding his head bluffly to deferential shopkeepers who stood at their doors, exchanging a jovial word or so with other substantial yeomen. Everyone knew and respected Jethro Jayne—“Young Jethro” of Folly Corner. Everyone in and around Liddleshorn knew that there had been Jaynes at Folly in unbroken succession since before the days of Cromwell.

He was a picturesque figure, with his open, weather-tanned face, his clean-shaven lip, his buff breeches, and brown gaiters. He wore a linen coat and a flapping white linen hat. His eyes were lazily merry and roguish under the starched brim.

He turned in at the door of the inn, with the low-pitched, paneled dining-room, where most of the farmers dined on market-day.

A round-faced, pretty girl brought him his plate of beef and his two vegetables. Bread and cheese, and a jug of sweet cider, completed the meal.

He looked at her thoughtfully whenever she approached: so very blue-eyed and round; such a plump, neat figure in a black gown! He looked at her through a strong cloud of smoke as he puffed at his pipe and drank a last glass of the cider. She had suggested something. He was thoughtfully asking himself, Why not?

Presently he took a pencil and a letter from his breeches pocket. He began to write on the back of the envelope, making many erasions, knitting his brows and pouting his lips like an anxious child.

The girl came softly to the table and took away the mustard for another customer. Jethro never looked up at her. She had done her part. She had suggested.

He paid the bill and emerged into High Street. He looked a trifle more bluff and lurching than before. His face was red—with cider, with the excitement of his daring plan.

For the first time in his life he was yielding to impulse. Already he half regretted yielding. He was afraid of himself; he was more afraid of Gainah.

Yet he bent his head and went down two steps into the editorial offices of the Liddleshorn Herald. The place was empty save for a sharp-featured youth who was lounging at the side of the counter. He sharply asked the visitor what he wanted. He was a new importation, an embryo journalist, with a London journal as his goal. He touched the town side of things only. He had a smoldering contempt for farmers, and knew nothing of the master of Folly Corner.

Jethro pushed his envelope across the counter with a sheepish gesture.

“How many insertions?” asked the youth laconically, yet throwing an amused, curious glance at the big figure which stood near the door—an unconscious, unappreciated color scheme—in white and russet, buff and brown.

“How many times in?” The gentleman-farmer’s big, embarrassed laugh seemed to shake the silent place. “Well—once.”

As he went slowly out of the town the tinkle of a piano came out clearly from the front room of a little buff villa. There were rows of these buff villas on the outskirts of the town. Some navvies were putting down new drain-pipes. The notes of the piano and the reedy voice of a girl came out slowly, each note isolated and mingled with the nervous tap of the pickax. Jethro stood still and listened. It was a song of Purcell’s:

“To make us seek ruin, to make us seek ruin and love those that hate.”

He walked on, a queer stirring at his heart. The thin voice of the girl in the villa had touched the romantic spot in him. He thought of that other girl at the inn—plump, blue-eyed, smiling. He thought of his carefully-worded advertisement which, by to-morrow, would be worming its way through Sussex, through Surrey and Hampshire to London perhaps.

It was a joke; he began to regret, to blame the cider, or the demure little rings of light hair on the waitress’ unlined brow.

And yet he could still hear the piano. He still felt the slow, wondering work of his heart.

FOLLY CORNER.

[CHAPTER I.]

THE story begins with the emotions of two women—the two women principally concerned—on a morning ten days after Jethro Jayne had imprudently indulged in sweet cider at the market dinner in Liddleshorn.

One woman was young—twenty-five or less. She was a big, fair girl; a handsome girl, in the elementary way that satisfies most men. She looked well able to take care of herself; an up-to-date girl, accustomed to fight her way alone, to meet men on their own ground, to jealously look after her own interests. There was, however, an occasional haggard line at her mouth, and in her well-opened, rather prominent gray eyes was a hunted, hopeless look.

She wore a coat and skirt, with sleeves of last year’s cut. Her hat was trimmed with strict attention to fashion, and yet bore the brand “home-made.” There was a crisp new veil tied about the brim.

She smacked so of cities that the few people she met turned round to slowly gape at her, and a couple of small girls coming home from the village shop laughed aloud in her angry face.

She walked slowly along the white road, stopping now and then to lift her veil and wipe her burning cheeks.

The scenery was beautiful—with the characteristic beauty of the Sussex Weald. But she did not notice: she was too preoccupied. Her own affairs were in a critical state, and when one is anxious there is small consolation in undulating hills, long stretches of pasture, and red-roofed farmhouses. Her attitude was quite cockney—prim regard for her shoes and half-contemptuous admiration of her surroundings predominated.

Once she stopped to rest. A thatched and plastered cottage stood empty under the shadow of huge oaks. Wide green glades wound into the very heart of a little wood. The turf, inch-deep in moss, yielded like down. It was irresistible. She threw herself flat on her back, settling her skirt smoothly under her, and looked lazily through the wide mesh of the veil at the sky. The heat and the perfect silence almost made her sleep. A trap went by full of gayly-dressed country girls; a young man, hideous in his Sunday clothes, was driving. They were all off to some festivity, and they looked curiously at the prone figure on the turf. At first they thought it was some tramp, but the thin-soled morocco shoes stuck out from the dusty skirt contradicted that assumption. Such vagrant ways these town folk had! They laughed derisively, and the sound roused her. She sat up and stared a trifle vaguely at the watchful hills, the glades of the wood, the white, winding ribbon of highroad. Then she rose and whisked her skirt and went on again.

Only once more was she tempted to stop—at a bramble bush where the blackberries were loose and juicy. She drew up her veil to her nose and drew them off the stalks with widely parted lips, because she was anxious not to soil the fingers of her gloves. It was so necessary to make a good impression: the woman who could always make a good impression had the world at her feet.

She crossed a common; fowls were scratching and shaking their wings in the mounds of dust; a long string of geese waddled by, conversing volubly, and with evident arrogance. A man with a timber wagon came toward her, and she stopped him to ask the way. He told her that she had a mile or more to go.

She went on, her feet dragging at every step. At every step she grew more nervous, more undecided. She took a letter from her pocket and read it over twice. She stopped, half turned back. Her face was violent red and chalk-white in turn. Still she went on, with lagging, heavy feet and a queer, terrified shame and excitement at her heart: went on over that open common which was just beginning to flush with heather. Another man came by, driving a black pig. It grunted, and seemed to run in every direction but the right one. He looked a stupid man; but, then, they were all half-witted in the country. She said—very slowly and deliberately, as if she were speaking to a small child—that she wanted Folly Corner. He gave a vacillating grin, keeping one eye on the pig, and pointed to a substantial stack of chimneys on the left.

“That be Folly,” he said laconically, and left her.

She could see the house through the dense leafage of three great elms. She stood, with one hand firmly gripping her gay parasol, and the other twitching at the crisp edge of her veil. She looked at the red gables, at the spreading outbuildings, at the garden, at the yard; she looked back at the hot road cutting across the common. Should she go back or should she go on? For a moment she closed her eyes, and immediately the dark, straight wall of the prison shot up slowly like a specter and chilled her.

The prison! The prison and the one damned, dear soul beating within its walls! But that was past. She had wrestled out that finally—at night, in her London room, close beneath the slates; at night, in her bed, the letter under her pillow, or twisting in her hot fingers.

The gate which led into the garden was a white wicket. At each side was a poplar. These had grown so thick and tall that they met midway and formed an arch. There was a path of red brick, a little raised, leading up to the house door; it led up straight, between box edgings two feet high. The garden-beds were rather neglected, but a great clump of red-hot pokers pointed flame fingers to the sky, and a loose white rose, like foam, clung to the walls and ran along the low roof. There was a long window each side the door, and in front of the one on the right was a yew-tree clipped into the shape of an umbrella. The clipping had been neglected, and the tree had the dishevelled appearance of a man who neglects to shave. There was an air of indolence about the garden, but it did not seem the indolence of poverty. A pond partly encircled the place. A red-and-white cow came down to drink and to look at her reflectively with its big, closely-veined eyes.

What sort of greeting was garnering for her beyond that door with the wooden hood, the veil of white roses, and the rough iron knocker? She looked at a Virginia creeper twisting among the roses. Autumn had touched it. She looked at the red leaves, then at the white flowers. They seemed flame and pale fire to strained eyes, short of sleep and dazzled with the sun. The deep, haggard line curved round her mouth. Within! What waited within?

*****

Within was the second woman, old Gainah Toat. She sat in a low-pitched room—the room on the right, made dark by the umbrella yew. There was a great open hearth. There were three doors: one led into a dairy; it was open, and showed the bricked floor, the yellow and brown pans, the thick cream and made-up butter; the second door opened into the passage; the third into the garden.

She sat by the third door, which was thrown well back. She could see the orchard strewn with mussel plums, ripe to rottenness, with little yellow stewing pears and apples specked with black. She did not seem to see anything; she had those eyes—cold blue with a dash of gray—that are always dull; eyes that evade and puzzle. They were very wide open, the lids rolled well back, and the lashes sparse.

She had a white face; there was a general appearance of wasting about her. The fingers, holding a letter—the other woman had been influenced by a letter too—were twisted and disfigured with rheumatism. Her body was flat and square; her faded gown made no pretense of slurring the defect. It went straight from her stringy throat to her hardly perceptible hips without a break, without a kindly fold or ruck of the stuff.

She was an odd-looking figure; a spectral woman almost—with her bloodless skin, her dead eyes, her twisted, transparent hands. But the people around Folly Corner were not given to fanciful imaginings; they only knew that Gainah seemed made of iron, that she worked on the farm without tiring from sunrise until night. Her life was spent in making things for other people to eat. She belonged to a dying type: she was one of those women who devote themselves to tickling the masculine palate. Machine-made food did not enter into her economy. Her mushroom ketchup, her marmalade, her blackberry jelly were renowned. She gave them to anyone who asked, not because she was generous, but because she was inordinately proud of her productions. She toyed with medicine too; made balm tea, and, from a particular sort of nettle, green ointment that would cure a gathering. She made herb beer and water cider to save beer at harvest-time. She knew the effect of foxglove on the human heart, and made a concoction of a certain herb which she gathered secretly. With it she claimed to cure palsy. She was mistress at Folly Corner. She had come to old Jethro Jayne when his wife died. She had brought up the present master by hand; she ruled him still.

Every master of Folly Corner had been a Jayne, and every male Jayne had been a Jethro since the first farmer had hidden his pet mare for ten days in a cellar so that Cromwell’s Ironsides should not steal her.

The room was always cool because the yew threw a continual shadow. Gainah, sitting without a glint of sun in her chilly blue gown and with her feet flat on the stone floor, seemed to have no part with the hot, throbbing world outside.

They were threshing on the farm; the whirring sound hummed in and the smell from the engine hung on the air. On the south wall a man, by her orders, was cutting back the foliage from the vine so that the sun might get freely at the Sweet-water grapes. In a few weeks it would be time to think about wine-making. The busiest time of the year was coming on. She hadn’t a moment to waste. She should at that moment have been straining the mushroom-juice from the salt and boiling it with spices. But the letter, fluttering in her veined, gnarled hand, had made her an idle woman before noon. She read it again with the weighty deliberation of an almost illiterate person. It was written in a dashing but undecided hand, and the words were stilted. Evidently the writer had been ill at ease.

She got up stiffly at last and moved about the room, flicking a duster over the ancient furniture. There was an oak cupboard reaching to the ceiling—a double corner cupboard with delicate brass escutcheons and an inlaid border of boxwood.

She ran the duster down the dark panels and breathed softly on the brass. Then she took out her keys from her apron pocket and opened the doors of the upper half. There were three shelves, the edge of each scalloped out. On every shelf were bottles and jars full of preserves and pickles. She touched them quite tenderly, looking at the faintly written labels, pursing up her colorless lips and moving her head spasmodically.

She shut the cupboard at last and went slowly on her journey round the room. She dusted the oak sideboard, the long oak table, with the form against the wall and the carved joint stools—the high one for the master, the low one for the dame—at each end. She dusted the chairs, some of solid oak, some of golden beech with rush seats. She dusted the clock; its hand pointed ominously to twelve.

It was about time then. In a few minutes she should be here. Gainah chuckled a little, remembering that she had purposely neglected to send the trap to the station. All the men were at harvest, and she had wanted old Chalcraft to trim the vine. She sat down by the door again, looking out blankly at the warmth and life. There were thick parchment-like mushrooms dotted over the meadow beyond the quickset hedge, and in the orchard fruit kept thudding softly from the trees. It was the beginning of rich autumn, when one makes provision for winter. She was always so busy through August and September; on her feet until late at night—late for Folly Corner—straining and boiling, and pulping and stirring; scolding the two maids and tyrannizing over Jethro.

Those mushrooms had been in salt too long; the wind-fall apples were almost past preserving. It was washing-day, too—they had washed on the first Monday in the month for thirty years. The soapy smell floated into the dining-parlor; she could hear the rasping sound of the brush and the gurgling swill of suds. She heard also the cackle of the two maids and the mellow voice of the elderly washerwoman. They were wasting their time. Yet she didn’t move. Her eyes fell to the letter which she had taken out of her pocket again. Her lips mumbled the signature—“PAMELA CRISP.”

After thirty-three years! And she had served his father before him! It was very hard! She wouldn’t give up her keys—he wouldn’t expect that. She smiled dryly. He wouldn’t expect that—he was a Jayne and he knew when he was well off. He would never get anyone else to slave so. Even the green tomatoes were pickled—with onions and apples and mysterious spices. She was the only woman for miles round who had the recipe, and before she died she meant to burn it, having no daughter to bequeath it to. And scarlet runners put down every year for winter eating. Her butter had never been known to have a twang. She could make cakes without fat and used snow for puddings when eggs were scarce.

The bed in the best room had been made under her eye from the feathers of birds killed on the farm.

Birds! It was not many henwives who could manage to hatch a full sitting. She never thought fifteen eggs too many to put under a hen; the Dorking might manage even more. The gray-and-white hen—didn’t it steal a nest of twenty-two and come clucking home at the end of three weeks with nineteen chicks, most of them pullets, too! A young, flighty woman would have spoilt everything by poking about and interfering with the bird. She had known all along that it was sitting in the barn, but she wasn’t going to let it know she knew. Young women spoilt their lives by haste. They spoilt the lives of other people too. Her eye dropped again to the dashing signature—“PAMELA CRISP.”

She sat brooding by the door, thinking proudly of all her domestic achievements and telling herself piteously that Jethro would never allow her to be displaced. Of course, she had known that he would marry some day, but then, in her own mind, she had picked him out a wife: pretty, soft-looking Nancy from Turle House. A wife—pliable and a little foolish, like Nancy—would not have mattered. But a cousin on the mother’s side! An unknown girl from London! A girl whose capital “P” trailed to the edge of the envelope!

She got up again and went round the dull room in her halting way, dusting and tidying mechanically. Then all at once she straightened her back and listened. There were light steps on the brick path which led round to the garden door. The clip-clip of the shears ceased. There were two voices—a young feminine one and the hoarse croak of old Chalcraft, who was past work, and lived out his life of long service like an ancient horse, doing light jobs, so that he might still believe himself useful and independent.

Gainah went out, the sun on her uncovered head, with its wide parting and gray-brown hair. She went round the corner. Chalcraft was on the ladder still. The shears yawned in his tremulous hand; he had clipped to the wall, and the Sweet-waters hung close to it and stripped of foliage, pale green and luscious. The long trails of grayish leaves were on the path; the girl trod them down. When she saw the elder woman she made a step forward. She seemed half defiant, half ashamed. Her hat was on one side; it gave her a rakish air of towns. Such a slight thing may imperil a woman’s reputation—in prejudiced eyes. Gainah’s cold eyes contracted, and her brows drew over them a harsh ridge.

Pamela put out her hand—in a new glove. A slim gold bracelet, from which dangled a green charm, swung on her wrist.

“You must be Gainah,” she said in a conciliating way, and smiling.

Then she added, with a faint touch of injury, “I wrote to say I was coming this morning. I hoped that you would send to meet me. It’s a long walk.”

Gainah gave her a sharp look; she thought that this was the first indication of authority.

“It’s harvest-time,” she said curtly; “the best harvest for seventeen years. Come inside.”

They both slipped over the threshold of that dim gray room with the stone floor and the solid family furniture. Pamela gave a swift glance round to see if the room was empty. There was a flaming spot on each cheek, and her glittering eyes moved uneasily behind her loose veil.

“I’d like to put myself tidy,” she said in the confiding whisper of one woman to another, “before I go in to him.”

“To your Cousin Jethro?” Gainah’s dull eyes fastened on the hectic face.

“To my Cousin Jethro—yes,” she laughed nervously; then added quickly, “It seems strange to call him ‘cousin.’ We’ve—we’ve never met. You got my letter? Yes. I—I want to be friends.”

Gainah didn’t answer. She only opened the door leading to the stairs. The two went up together. There was a high window halfway up, with a lattice of thick oak bars.

“No glass,” said Pamela in astonishment.

“They didn’t use glass in the days when that was cut,” Gainah said, “and the Jaynes are not people to go with new-fangled ways. Every Jayne says that what was good enough for his father is good enough for him. It’s a family not given to changing. You ought to know that; you belong to it.”

“On the mother’s side—yes,” returned the girl in a half-hearted way.

Gainah opened the door of her own bedroom. It was poorly furnished with her own furniture, which she had brought with her to Folly Corner. There was a wooden bedstead, painted clay color and touched with lines of apple-green. The washstand and drawers matched it. There was a strip or so of shabby felt carpet, and on the shelf a pair of brass candlesticks and a red china cow milked by a diminutive woman. The girl looked about her disdainfully, assertiveness getting the better of nervousness. She took off her hat and veil before the murky glass, splashed water over her face, patted her hair caressingly, arranged again the smart hat and veil. Gainah watched this pretty toying of youth with grim disapproval; even the girl’s big arms lifted to her head were an offense.

“Like a brass button in a sweep’s eye, all glitter,” the old woman mumbled to herself, as the yellow and green bracelet swung on the round wrist and the jet buckles flashed in the elaborate hat.

On the way downstairs she was afforded a peep into other bedrooms.

“I can’t let you have the best spare room,” she declared autocratically. “This is it. It’s never used, except for layin’s out and weddin’ nights, and layin’s in. All the Jaynes, right back to King Charles, have been born in that bed—and died in it afterward.”

Pamela looked at the ponderous piece of furniture and shuddered.

“I wouldn’t sleep there for worlds,” she said.

Gainah, her claw-like hand caught stiffly round the banisters to help her progress, went slowly down, stair by stair. Pamela, close behind her, looked contemptuous—of everything: the old-fashioned place, the odd old woman.

They crossed the room which the yew made so dark. Gainah opened the door into the narrow corridor. Pamela followed. There was a window looking out at the garden. On the ledge were blood-red geraniums, and on the distempered walls queer prints in black frames.

She didn’t approve of those crinkled, brownish prints; they were hardly decent.

Gainah flung open the door of the other room.

“Jethro,” she said in her high, grating voice, “here’s your Cousin Pamela—on the mother’s side.”

[CHAPTER II.]

THE girl winced and hung back, as one does at physic or a possible blow. She looked along the narrow passage, as if for the support of another woman. But Gainah had hobbled away, shutting the door behind her. Pamela stood alone. She looked round her—at the oak table strewn with papers—old copies of the Field and Farm and Home.

There were a pair of driving-gloves thrown down, and a whip with a broken thong. There was a great blue bowl half full of waste paper and ends of string. A pair of brass candlesticks winked on the ledge beside the vivid geraniums. She gave a second nervous look at the colored prints in black frames, prints of which she did not quite approve. A full voice from inside the room said impatiently, “Come in.”

She didn’t advance, so the voice added, with a mellow laugh in it, “Come in. Why did Gainah go away? Come in, Cousin Pamela. I cannot move from this confounded sofa.”

So he was crippled! Her wild gray eyes darted across the garden and along the hot road. If she could only just softly open that door and slip out without seeing him! A cripple! She might have known that there was something.

“Come in.”

She made a desperate step forward: it was so like a fool to stay outside. She had come to the house on certain business, and she must go through with it. Her foot in the arched morocco shoe tapped on the bare oak floor. Then it sunk into a thick carpet. She could not see the occupant of the room yet; he was on a couch in the bay window which looked across the harvest fields. All that she could see was a wall hung with gorgeous flowered paper, a carpet with a green ground and bunches of Provence roses, a round walnut table, and a piano with a closed lid.

It was like coming from December to June at a breath—this transit from the dim ancestral living-room to the parlor with the walnut and velvet suite from the best shop in Liddleshorn. Yet Pamela hardly noticed. The only thing that mattered was the sofa in the bay window. Would that man, that cripple on the sofa, be favorably impressed with her?

She was sick and hot with apprehension. Had any girl been in such a position before? She began to think dimly of early tales that she had read of slave markets, of a poem learnt and recited at school about a quadroon girl.

Of course old Gainah didn’t know all—didn’t know anything that was truth. What an odd old woman! Not pleasant to live with. Not a cheerful house in which to spend the winter! She went slowly over that thick carpet to the bay window, her head down, her upper lip caught fiercely over her lower. When she reached the sofa she was in an agony of shame, and hardly lifted her eyes.

Jethro said, almost tenderly:

“Do sit down.”

The words were simple, but she liked him from that moment. She felt sure of him. He wouldn’t be—coarse. She sat down. There was a low walnut chair with a green cover drawn into the bay all ready. Then she dared to look up.

Jethro was flat on his back. He was so spare that his body seemed to curve inward; but it was the spareness of a tough, muscular man. His upper lip was bare and his eyes were keen, merry blue. A life of sunshine and wind and rain had tanned his skin. The backs of his hairy hands looked as if they had been steeped in tobacco juice; beyond his wrist, where his coat sleeve pushed up, his skin was milky. He wore an Oxford shirt with an unstarched collar. She saw a ring of milk-white skin when he turned his head to look at her, and immediately above it he was the color of delicate old leather.

She looked at his handsome face and muscular body with interest. Well! It might be worse—or better. A little round table with a red and gold cloth was within touch. He put out his hand and touched a toppling pile of letters.

“These were all answers,” he said, smiling drolly. “I had them addressed to Liddleshorn post-office, as you know. Three hundred and fifty. I shall get some more to-morrow morning, no doubt.”

“Don’t!” she cried out sharply, “oh, don’t! It—it—it—a man doesn’t know.... A woman has little secret shames—you won’t understand.... I wish I hadn’t come. Three hundred and fifty girls! Oh! They are not coming here, too?”

She stopped, panting. Her eyes were on those letters, letters in every shape and color, some with gilt monograms on the back, one with a gilt “Nell.” She looked at the handwriting, some blotted and some scrawling, some neatly masculine and clerk-like. Her face looked old, her eyes blistered with tears.

Jethro struggled to rise. Then with a groan of pain and sharp twist of his injured leg he fell back on the cushions.

Her back was firm against the carved walnut of the green-seated chair, as they sat in such strange conference in the deep shadow of the bay. Through the hot mist of her tears she saw the harvest field, half clipped, like the shorn head of beauty. A big brown fellow of a humble bee came through the open casement and settled on her. She flinched. Jethro regarded it as an omen.

“When a humble bee flies in at the open window and lights on a stranger and flies out again, it’s a sign the stranger will not stay long,” he said, looking quite disturbed as the insect droned out into the sun again.

She looked at him with mild contempt, thinking it most extraordinary that a big fellow such as he was should entertain such notions.

There were the usual sounds of fully blown summer; petulant buzz of overworked insects, voices of harvesters, the whirr of the engine. Taps from the smithy at the corner intensified in Pamela’s aching head; ever afterward she regarded smithy sounds as indispensable to the perfection of an August day.

Suddenly she broke out passionately:

“I can’t stay. I shouldn’t have come. It is the sort of thing that a barmaid, a shop girl—someone a little reckless—would do. I am different.” She stretched her hand and directed it haughtily toward the letters. “I am not like these others. But it was a temptation: such a rest, such a certainty for the future. And ... it was half a joke, too.”

Jethro put out his immense brown hand and gripped her by the forefinger and thumb round the wrist. She looked fully at him for the first time, and, in spite of herself, she liked his face. It was handsome. The thin high nose and beautifully curved lips made it even aristocratic. She was a shallow town product, and had a flimsy horror of anything that she considered coarse. Yet she admitted that on this man’s face was no touch of boorishness. He looked, so she thought, like a patrician who was masquerading in queer clothes. Her idea of masculine raiment was confined to black cloth, with tweeds for the seaside and flannel for tennis.

“I like you,” he said simply. “You are a nice-minded girl. It was a joke with me, too—half a joke. I did it on market day; a fellow gets a bit jolly then, perhaps. I shouldn’t have gone any further with these.” He touched the letters with his free hand, and the touch was enough to scatter them rudely on the floor. “But your name took my fancy. PAMELA CRISP! Now, my mother was a Crisp.”

“Yes, so you told me in your letter,” she said faintly, and gently fluttering her white, veined wrist in its handcuff. “You told me to write and tell Miss Toat that we were cousins—on the mother’s side. I did it—as a joke. Oh! a joke—you believe me?”

“Of course—a joke. It is nothing more—not yet.” His clear, blue eyes were on her pastel-like face. Then he added ponderingly: “But we may be cousins, after all. It wouldn’t make any difference—in the end. You understand?”

She showed how fully she understood by the quick wave of color on her cheek.

“My mother’s name was Lilith,” he went on.

“The name of my little sister who died.”

“My mother had a brother who ran away—some boy’s scrape at home. He was never heard of afterward. His name was John.”

“My father’s name.” She became suddenly confidential. “He was a contractor; plenty of money while he lived. We had a house a little way out of London. He drove to his office every day. Two servants, a governess for me, a dinner party now and then. When I grew up, a little shopping, a little housework in an elegant way—arranging flowers, setting the maids by the ears. You know. Thousands of girls live like that and are bored to death. He died bankrupt; mother died of a broken heart, or broken fortunes, poor dear. I was thrown on the world—the creditors took everything. That is five years ago.”

He had been listening attentively, watching every shade and shine upon her face, admiring her vivacious, half tragic gestures—not understanding her in the least. The genteel life she so scornfully sketched was unknown to him.

“You were the only one?”

“What?”

She lifted her head, rearing it almost, like an aggressive serpent.

“You were my Uncle John’s only child?”

“No.” The word came full and rounded from her mouth, and the eyes behind the curtaining lashes were somber. “There was a—a brother. He has gone away, a long voyage. He has a passion for the sea.”

“That settles it. Another brother of my mother’s, Uncle Thomas, was a captain in the navy. He ran away before he was sixteen; nothing would stop him. Every Crisp has a salt drop in his veins.”

“Father, in his most prosperous days, had a little yacht.”

“There you are again! The Crisp love for water. Well! I believe from my heart that we really are cousins—Cousin Pamela. I shall tell the folk hereabout that I advertised for my kin—Uncle John or his children—and that you, seeing the advertisement, answered. That will make things easy for us both. And now, cousin”—his voice was meaning, and his handsome open face became roguish and bold—“I ought to kiss you.”

She slipped her wrist from his finger and thumb and fell back.

She looked at his face—handsome, thin, almost ascetic if it had not been for the tan—with distaste.

“A kiss!” she murmured, with a quick, startled breath. “No, no; I couldn’t dream of it.”

He seemed pleased at what he assumed to be her modesty. There was a quaint pause, during which he thoughtfully examined her face, picking feature from feature and dwelling most on the downcast lids. Then he said, almost tenderly:

“What have you been doing these five years for a living? Cousin Pamela! if only I had known that Uncle John’s child——”

“Don’t talk like that. We are not sure. What did I do?” She gave a short, rather grating laugh. “Anything—short of scrubbing floors. I’ve been a governess. I’ve tried to draw fashion-plates—but my drawing was against me there. I’ve collected money for charitable institutions—on commission. I was a companion. She was a publican’s widow with heaps of money—one dare not be too particular. She was queer—a secret drinker I always thought. I had twenty-five pounds a year. She liked me so much that she raised my money at one bound to forty; money was only dirt to her. Forty pounds a year—and she died before the first quarter was due. I have always been unlucky.”

“And then?”

She shrugged with an artificial callousness.

“Looking out. Answering advertisements—until I answered yours.”

Directly she mentioned his the shame and outraged modesty in her surged up again.

“I’ve never answered an advertisement like that before,” she burst out. “But—it was fun, as you say. And I had put three advertisements in a paper for a situation—at three-and-sixpence for forty words. Three three-and-sixpences! Not a single answer! Something made me look at the Liddleshorn Herald. It was in the stationer’s shop—ordered specially for some customer. When I was a little thing I seem to remember that paper about at home. The name, Liddleshorn, was familiar. Something made me touch it, look down the advertisements. Then! You know!”

She put out her hands with a dramatic gesture. Jethro appeared to think that it was time he made his explanations of the situation.

“I did it for fun—at first,” he said. “Afterward I was rather taken with the idea. But not with the girls,” seeing her glance vindictively at the scattered letters. “I wanted to marry; Gainah’s getting too tight a hold on the place. And there is no one to entertain lady visitors—no mistress. It isn’t natural. I wanted a wife. I advertised for one. I wanted a change, too—a change of blood. It’s good for stock, why not for us? That’s the way I argued it out with myself.”

Her chin was sunk in the puffs of her white muslin blouse and the color was in her cheeks again. But he went on, apparently not noticing her confusion.

“For generations back every Jayne has married in the neighborhood. We are all related in some way; you meet the Jayne nose on a Crisp face—you have the Crisp chin—and a Furlonger little finger,” he crooked out his own, “on a Jayne hand. Nancy Turle has my father’s waving red hair, and I’ve got the Turles’ white skin.”

He tucked up the sleeve of his coat to show her his smooth, milky skin.

“I thought,” he continued, as she neither looked nor spoke, “that a change would be good. Change! You see it in stock; you see it in flowers. Those crimson phloxes,” he pointed through the window, “are twice as high this year because last autumn they were shifted in the border. And Gainah, who knows all about flowers, says she can’t grow heartsease three years running without lifting. They dwindle to farthing-faces. Even cabbage mustn’t follow cabbage. I said to myself that I’d graft new blood on the old Jayne stock.”

Pamela lifted her flaming face, and, putting out her thin foot, contemptuously kicked the nearest letter.

“Then you had better take one of these,” she said, with temper, “if, as you seem to think, I am a Crisp and your cousin.”

He looked at the foot which darted from her skirt.

“It’s a Furlonger foot,” he said simply. “Cousins! There isn’t a doubt. But I’m content to take the way of my fathers.”

“I—I don’t know. It is early. You’d better let me go back.”

As she spoke she fleetly shut her eyes, so that she could see neither the golden wheat-field nor the handsome face. At once the steep wall of the prison ran up, and above it, searing her eyes, was the blinding dome of sky. Beyond she saw the railway line, the dreary waste land, a solitary old cottage, a tethered goat; on the edge of the earth, meeting the sky, the bristling chimneys of the distant suburb beyond the Scrubbs.

The prison! That chapter of her life was nearly ended. She knew that she was weak; knew that she would yield to Jethro. Already she almost felt as if that golden field of wheat half belonged to her. She would yield. Why not? It was so simple, so idle. How she had longed for rest, and more—for freedom! The heel of another woman had been very hard on her neck. Just to go back to London, pack her boxes, take a cab, bid her landlady farewell—and leave no trace. When he came out from prison he would not find her—that was all.

“I might stay—and see,” she said faintly, opening her gray eyes.

“Very well. You want a situation; I offer you one. I pay you thirty-five pounds a year for gowns and things. That between ourselves. At the end of the year—we’ll see. To the world, to Gainah, you are my Cousin Pamela.”

“I’d like to earn my thirty-five pounds,” she said sturdily.

“Of course. You’ll make the place pretty, as young women can. You’ll entertain all your distant relations—the Turles and Crisps and Furlongers. You can write letters for me until I get about again. I’m like a log just now. Look here!” He rolled down the covering and showed his bandaged limb. “I got a fork run into my leg in the harvest field, and it turned to a nasty wound. But I shall be about again soon.”

“That is all?” She breathed relief, and the glint of distaste in her eyes faded out.

“That is all. You didn’t think I was a cripple?”

“I didn’t know.”

“You really do favor my Uncle John,” Jethro said, after a pause. “Do you mind—it will be your first duty—getting a leather case from that top, left-hand drawer? Yes, that’s it,” when she brought it back. “See! Here he is. Now, isn’t the mouth the same?”

He held before her the faded likeness, taken on silver, of a young man in staid black clothes, and with straggling side whiskers.

“Taken just before he ran away. Is it anything like your father?”

She stared at the dim old portrait for a long time before she answered. Her eyes took in every detail—the doubled fist on a bulky book, the vapid smile, the too apparent watch-chain with its bunch of seals.

“I can’t say,” she returned faintly at last. “This is a young man. Father was gray when I remember him. He married late in life. He had a white beard. But I think,” she held the portrait thoughtfully sideways, “that the mouth is something like. Father had a bare lip to the end of his days.”

She shut the case and laid it on the table. Another bee came in and darted at the nodding cherries in her hat. The metallic clink from the smithy became more persistent. Jethro said gently at last, putting out the big brown hand which was so dry and yielding:

“Then it is settled?”

Pamela, her head down, the long, haggard line deep on her lips, said almost inaudibly:

“Yes.”

The word had hardly died away before Gainah, in her dim blue cotton gown with the skimped skirt and straight bodice, put her head in at the door and asked harshly if the newly-found cousin meant to stay to dinner.

[CHAPTER III.]

HER past was tightly packed away behind her—packed as remorselessly, as perfectly, as she had corded her boxes; with much effort and expenditure of strength, but with a perfect regard to safety. She was out of London. Never again would she let her eyes of anguish light on the prison.

She was driving with Jasper along the dusty Sussex road, which barely a week before she had trudged wearily and with many misgivings. The prosperity and ease and promise of her new life struck at her, soothed her, with many minute details—the soft carriage-rug, the sleek coat of the mare, the polished harness. She had a passion for ease, for pretty things, for worldly status.

Folly Corner became her home—her sheltered home. Time passed. As the weeks wore on her face grew mobile and careless, dull pink begun to timidly bloom on her skin, her eyes brightened. She was happy, occupied, free from anxiety. Above all, she had plenty of pence, need never deny herself a penny pleasure—and she was one of those mercurial women who can be made happy by a bar of French chocolate, and miserable by a shabby hat. Once she said, with a bitter-sweet laugh, to Jethro:

“I was never made for responsibility. I ought to live in a harem. A bon-bon, a pat on the head from my master, would make me absolutely content.”

He seemed amused at first, then he looked puzzled, and then displeased. He had decided already in his serious, practical way, that she was to be his wife, and whimsicality struck him as unorthodox—nearly as bad as dissent. The Jaynes had always been stanch churchmen, and never spoke without first weighing every word.

Sometimes, in spite of herself, she gave a backward thought. Sometimes the hunted, tragic gleam lighted its taper in her happy eyes. Some shadow of the old grief, some touch of the old delirious joy and misery, stirred her. Rain against the window, a rumble of thunder, a shrieking wind, or a harsh voice was enough to frighten her. She felt a gnawing uncertainty. Would this peace, this ease, continue?

When these uncomfortable thoughts assailed her she plunged fiercely into work, clicking her needle and thimble through new calico, or darting about the rambling house with a duster. She was pathetically anxious to earn her salary, to be absolutely independent of Jethro’s charity. She had not yet decided whether her torn heart would allow her to marry him when the time came.

One morning he strolled down the weedy gravel path of the oblong kitchen-garden, with the holly hedge as wall on all four sides, and the holly arch as postern at the entrance. There were grass paths between the beds: they wanted mowing and leveling. The wide herbaceous borders were full of weeds. The gravel path going straight from one end to the other was a harmony in green and yellow.

There was a gardener at Folly Corner, but Gainah made him clean boots, chop wood, and carry buckets; while Jethro made him drive and groom the horses, and pressed him into service when he was short of hands on the farm. Consequently the garden was unattended. Scarlet pimpernel was vivid on the dry ground, bindweed bound round the cabbage-stalks, and wild clumps of blazing corn marigold bloomed unheeded.

Pamela was loitering in an archway of dead scarlet-runners, collecting seed, by Gainah’s orders. Gainah was mistress of the garden. Jethro came along the alley in his thick brown boots. His hands were in his breeches pockets; a Michaelmas daisy, which he had pulled from the border as he strolled, was in his mouth. He looked at Pamela, half tenderly, half quizzically—a look which always set her pulses throbbing. She could never forget, when she was alone with him, the piquant circumstances which had brought her under his roof. Sometimes when Gainah imposed distasteful tasks her neck would swell, and she told herself proudly that by next autumn she could, if she chose, be mistress of Folly Corner.

Her basket was three parts full of seed-pods—like the fingers of dainty gloves stretched over bones. As she moved the seeds made a dice-like rattle. Jethro took the basket from her and begun to pull the pods off the dry yellow stalks himself.

“You shouldn’t be at this work,” he said, lifting her white hand with his free one. “Why can’t Daborn do it?”

“Gainah likes to see to these things herself.”

“You must be mistress over Gainah.”

“Not yet,” she broke out involuntarily, and then flushed.

Jethro laughed.

“I’m glad you put it that way. Evidently we are of the same mind. Suppose we say six months instead of a year, Cousin Pamela.”

“No, no! A year, as we decided.”

She looked vaguely through the wasted tendrils of the dead beans as they clung to the sticks—looked in the direction of London. Jethro had once said carelessly London was that way, jerking his broad brown thumb widely. After that, she looked across the common whenever that chill thought of the prison stole in and numbed her brain.

“Come a little way along the road. If Gainah sees us she’ll call you in,” he said almost pleadingly. “I never get you to myself.”

He pulled out his turnip-like silver watch, which had been his grandfather’s, and added that he had ten minutes. Daborn was grooming the roan mare, ready to drive him in the dogcart to Liddleshorn.

“You might come too,” he said.

“No. Gainah would be angry.”

“You mustn’t think too much of her. After all, she’s a paid servant.”

“So am I.”

Her face, under the brim of her Panama hat, was arch and mournful at the same moment.

They went along the gravel path. Jethro took out his pocket-knife and cut off the head of a great plantain.

“The place wants seeing to,” he said with dissatisfaction, looking at the weeds in the bed. “It wants a mistress. You should see the garden at Turle House. Nancy manages that. Nancy in some sort of way must be your cousin. We are all relations.”

It was the last day of September, and there had been a frost early in the morning. The blackened marrow plants straggled on their mound. Daborn had clamped the beet the day before, and the broken leaves, with their wine-colored stems, were scattered. The plumy foliage of the carrots had died down. The sparkling parsnip leaves were yellow, and dew glittered on the crinkled, bluish leaves of the savoys with their tight hearts. The sun shone brightly, but the air was crisp. Everything was ominous of winter. Pamela shivered as she looked at the solid chimney stacks of Folly Corner, and pictured an iron winter in the fastness of that old house, with Gainah as grim companion.

They went through the yard into the road. Daborn had the dogcart out. Pamela stopped by the wall of the granary, her foot twined in a bit of trailing periwinkle.

“Give me the basket,” she said, “and good-by.”

Jethro looked at her.

“You’d better come too,” he said. “Jump in.”

“No. My dress; no gloves.”

“Tuck your hands under the rug. At Liddleshorn we’ll buy gloves. Jump up. We shan’t want you, Daborn. Here’s the basket. Miss Crisp will hold the reins.”

Pamela still hesitated, looking back at the house, and remembering she had promised Gainah that she would mark some pillow-slips. But it was such a magic morning, with an intensely blue sky—a March sky almost, with a spice of frost lurking behind the hot sun. There were long trails of red bryony berries on the hedges; glittering gossamer webs were woven across the clumps of broom on the common. Jethro looked so strong and masterful—such a man! She believed that in the end she would marry him whether she wanted to or not. He had a rough manner of command with women—savage, yet tender. Pamela, like a woman, loved it. She lifted her foot, swung up to the blue cushion, and a moment later they were bowling smoothly along the road.

He didn’t speak. He flicked at the mare with a tinge of pettishness. Pamela sat well back. She felt a person of some importance; every small girl they met bobbed her little skirts into the dust, and the heavy-footed laboring men lifted a finger to their hair as Jethro bowled by in the flashing sunshine.

He pulled up at the gate of a small farm, and asked Pamela to hold the mare while he went in. The farmer had a farrowing sow for sale.

She just clasped the slack reins. The farmhouse was so overgrown with fruit-trees and ivy that the mellow bricks were shrouded. By and by Jethro came swinging down the path, with a weak old man hobbling behind him. They went and leaned over the piggeries, which were on the left of the gate. She caught a word or two here and there; it was Greek to her. Jethro surveyed the huge black sow keenly before he closed the bargain. Then he swung open the gate in his familiar impetuous way, and just before he got up into the cart he turned to the old man and said with a kind of careless authority:

“You ought to get out of this. Sell up and go into lodgings. It isn’t good for a man to live alone.”

To Pamela he added in a bluff aside:

“Mansell has lost his missus.”

She leaned toward the straggling, shambling figure, and threw a faint smile of sympathy. He was a foolish-looking old man, with a face made more imbecile by a loose, slobbering lip and the short silvery spikes of a week-old beard. He began to pour out his misery and loneliness, perhaps because she, like his dead wife, was a woman.

“Missis died six months ago,” he said tremulously, as he twisted his dirty hands and gave his watery smile. “She was a good missis. But,” with a crowing cackle of laughter, “I was good, too. I never knocked her down, nor give her a black eye. I didn’t offen even scold her. Step inside.” His face and voice were eager. “I’d like you to have a look round.”

Pamela, oddly touched, said gently to Jethro:

“Let me go. You come too.”

They tied the mare to the gatepost, and went up the path to the brooding house in its tangle of ivy and its unpruned jungle of ancient plum-trees. The widower went first, chattering volubly all the time, his back bent, his hand heavy on the polished knob of his stick.

They went into the low-pitched living-room. The fusty smell turned Pamela faint. The old man seemed to divine her nausea.

“You should ha’ seen how missis kept it,” he said deprecatingly. “But, Lord bless you, I am a helpless old man, seventy-nine come October, and I can’t clean. I’m alone. Missis and the children dead. But I aint afraid.” He gave an apprehensive glance at the shadows of the murky room. “Why should I be? What I always says is this”—he kept peppering his platitudes with the silly laugh that went to the girl’s heart—“God, who made me, aint a-goin’ to kill me.”

Pamela looked round the room. Everything, inside and out of the farm, had gone to pieces for the lack of a capable woman.

“I did used to keep the garden terrible nice,” the old man said, seeing her gray eyes look through the door into the sunny wilderness. “But there! missis is gone! I’ll show you her earrings.”

He hobbled away into the adjoining room. Pamela heard him jingling metal and scrooping wooden furniture over the flag floor. Presently he came out with a card-board box shaking in his hand. He took the lid off reverently and held out the open box. A pair of earrings, of very pale gold, such as you can buy at fairs for a trifle, were on a bed of tissue paper.

“Very pretty,” the girl said lamely.

Jethro had gone outside. He was viewing the neglected fruit-trees severely.

“And there’s one more thing I must show you.”

Mansell hobbled away, up the crazy stairs this time, and came back with a snow-white smock, which he thrust into her hands.

“Missis made this for me to be married in.” He stuck his foolish red face forward and grinned more widely. “She put her best work into it. Lord bless you, when I was but a boy—I’m seventy-nine come October—we used to go to church on Sundays, every man in his clean smock. Missis did it. She was a rare one at her needle.”

Pamela looked at the exquisite, delicate stitching. The whole heart of that dead woman was woven into the diamonds and honeycombs and lattices of the wedding smock.

“Very pretty,” she said lamely again.

“I must get to Liddleshorn before ten,” Jethro cried out from the garden.

She stepped into the sun, Mansell behind her. He followed them to the gate, seeming pathetically anxious to hold on to human companionship as long as he could. A sheep-dog came running out from the barn. Pamela, who was distrustful of dogs, felt glad that she was in the cart.

“He won’t bite, bless you; he’s too old. But when he was young he was s’ savage. Missis used to set one side of the fire winter nights, and I used to set the other. And she, just for fun, used to say to me, ‘Oh, dear,’ and I used to say, ‘Oh, dear.’ You should have heard him growl. He was s’ savage you durstn’t move or speak.”

Jethro gathered the reins with an air of business.

“You must get out of this,” he advised, with curt good nature.

“I suppose I must. Yet I’d like to stop on. Yet since missis died everything’s gone to pieces. I used to get such good living—fresh butter and new-laid eggs. I can churn myself, but no one seems to care for my butter. Don’t know why; there was a great call for missis’s.”

“Well, good-by to you,” said Jethro, with masculine intolerance of his whimpering garrulity.

“Good-by and God bless you. Take care of yourselves. Come and see me again.” His bleared blue eyes were turned pleadingly on Pamela. “And, Master Jayne”—he looked from one to the other, and his shrill voice quavered childishly—“when you gets a missis may you never lose her. A man’s no good without a missis.”

The cart moved on. Presently Pamela said softly, “Poor old thing! he made me feel quite miserable.”

“He’s not quite right in his head. But—you heard what he said, Cousin Pamela? A man’s no good without a missis.”

The strong brown hand in the worn driving-glove plunged under the holland carriage-rug and took her bare fingers significantly.

“It’s true enough,” Jethro said thoughtfully, after a bit. “I’m worried about Folly Corner. Something’s wanting. The food’s all right——”

“Now, the food isn’t right,” she put in briskly. “Plenty of it—yes. But the serving! Who ever heard of a meat pudding brought to table in its basin! Fancy cheese on the breakfast-table! White sugar should be grated over the tarts and—oh, many things. Some of them I couldn’t mention to you: it wouldn’t be nice.”

She was thinking of a thrifty trick of Gainah’s: the unhatched eggs found in a hen that had been killed were used for cakes. She thought it perfectly horrid, and her town squeamishness made her feel that there was a certain indelicacy involved in the proceeding. At all events she couldn’t mention such a thing to Jethro.

“And the other day,” she continued, broodingly, “a pig was killed. Gainah was in the kitchen all day. She made me go out, too. The things they did with that pig! The savory horrors she turned out!”

Jethro gave a great jolly laugh.

“Chitterling and fagots and scraps,” he cried. “I like them. You are not a farmer’s wife—yet. Gainah is a splendid housekeeper. It isn’t the housekeeping. It is the—the—difference. You know what I mean. Flowers in the vases; the dinner-table dainty, not solid. Foolish things—but they make a difference.”

“They are important things. They certainly make a difference—all the difference. You’ve been dominated too long by that old woman. The place has the wrong tone. Do you understand what I mean? It looks a farmer’s house. It ought to look a gentleman’s.”

“But I am a farmer—and proud of it.”

“Of course. It is the fashion to farm nowadays. It is quite genteel if—if you lose money over it.”

He seemed puzzled at her pert extravagance, and said stolidly that he was glad that his farming paid—every Jayne was a good farmer; it was in the blood.

“Well,” said Pamela, with a shrug and a droll smile, “you can get the effect anyhow. We must put up with prosperity. There are many things I’ll do, if you’ll let me. The housemaid must wear a cap with lappets in the afternoons. She should wait at table, and bring your newspaper in on a tray; letters, too, when there are any. I’ll train her. Of course, Gainah does not know how; she will be grateful to me for hints. You are very slow down here in Sussex. Did I tell you that I lived for six months in a boarding-house?” There was the faintest quiver of her heavy lids. “I carved and kept accounts. Things were done very well there. I have moved about the world and kept my eyes open.”

While she was making this smug little speech Jethro looked at her with satisfaction. She was a woman of wit, of knowledge. Her glib tongue was refreshing and piquant after the demure monosyllables and faint opinions—always watered by Mamma—of the Liddleshorn damsels.

They were smoothly clattering down the High Street.

“Furniture.” Pamela pointed to the upholsterer’s. “There should be oak in the dining-room.”

“There is oak at Folly Corner.”

“Is that oak?” She opened her big eyes and arched her faint dun brows. “Then it is different. We had a beautiful carved dinner-wagon at the boarding-house.”

“It was my father’s grandfather’s furniture, and his grandfather’s before him,” Jethro said conservatively.

FOLLY CORNER

CONTENTS

[PROLOGUE.]

[CHAPTER I.]

[CHAPTER II.]

[CHAPTER III.]