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work.
    Behind the two men the house was alight with candles. Richard shifted uncomfortably.
    â€œIf you was to talk to her, sir,” he began, “like enough she’d come out. I’ll take t’others into the house.”
    It was suggested with great natural delicacy, and when the doors were shut old Galantry walked up and down and round about the garden, talking and pleading with his wife, who was hidden somewhere in the dark. He scolded her, coaxed her, and even begged her, but there was no reply, no heavier movement, and after a long time he went into the library, stoked up the fire until it blazed, and sat in there with the curtains pulled back, the warm inviting glow shining out over the short grass.
    There was nothing sentimental in the gesture. On the contrary, he he made the arrangement with broken-hearted embarrassment, for he would have done the same thing to entice home a sulky or wounded dog. He was tired, and as he leaned back in his chair he felt old and a fool. The consequences of his folly were bouncing all over him, like apples from an overturned barrel. The other side of his distress, the fear, the aching misery, which was not his by right, but appeared to belong to a younger Galantry cheated out of it by circumstance so long before, still startled him.
    He sat there waiting until the dawn.
    Jason found Shulie at three in the morning. It was still dark and very sharp weather. He and old Larch were walking back to the farm kitchen after a night of successful labour in the barn, and their minds were full of the difficulties of birth. Jason was still young at that time, but he had already begun to get the shiny, corded appearance, which stamped ‘horse’ all over him when he got older. Larch was old already; a placid, gentle old man. Nothing worried or surprised him, and his voice was as soothing as his enormous seamy hands.
    Jason, who had little respect for anything on two legs and something like veneration for anything on four, loved him on occasions like this, and was always nervous in case the old man died or got seized up with the rheumatics. He was thinking of heating the old chap with something that would warm the blood of a jack fish, when they heard a sound almost at their feet.
    Jason was carrying the lantern, and he raised it. He saw the situation immediately.
    Back in the summer the top of a badly-stacked waggon load of hay had floundered off into an old dry ditch just outside the farm gate. At the time it had been protected casually with a faggot or two from a nearby pile, and Jason had been meaning to have the whole thing cleared, but had never got round to sparing the labour. Now a darkhole marked the mouth of a little cave in it, and out of the hole hung a corner of green satin petticoat.
    Both men had heard the story, of course.
    Richard’s visit to the Home Farm, although discreet, had not really deceived anybody. Besides the whole countryside was waiting for the gypsy to run away, and had been so waiting for a twelvemonth.
    Jason whistled through his teeth. “We’d better go up to the Hall,” he said softly. But before Larch nodded the sound which had first arrrested them came again, and the old man took the lantern.
    â€œReckon there’s summat to do,” he observed briefly. “Let me get down, master, will ’ee? Let me get down in ’ere.”
    So Larch delivered the last son old Galantry ever had, and his household felt it was disgraced and humiliated.
    As he stood on the far side of the cart track in the darkness, Jason smelled the sweet hay and the clean morning air, which no red curtains had polluted, and he heard the old horseman talking as he had heard him a hundred times before, soothing, caressing, and so quiet that his voice might have been a stream mumbling. It was meaningless sound most of the time, sometimes sharp and almost brutally commanding, and then soft again, gentle and persuasive.
    â€œNow, now. Now, now. Har!