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There, there. Now, now. Yes, yes. Yes. A good little old gel. A good little old gel. Soon, soon. Now, now.”
    The sky was lightening, the birds had started to whistle, and Jason was chilled to the bone. The yellow lantern glow shining through the dry grasses, and the spiky silhouette of the faggots, now obscuring, now revealing outlines and colours within, reminded him of something which he felt uncomfortably was Popery.
    There was no need to ask if the woman was alive, for he could hear her heavy breathing. She was a good ’un in one respect, anyway, he thought, for there was not a sound out of her now that she knew that she was not alone.
    Now the crisis was rising again. He could hear the quiet voice of Larch, the rustling, the single sound from the woman, the agonized, heroic breathing.…
    The shocking impropriety of the whole affair burst on Jason suddenly; colour flooded his face, and the country boy still in him swept aside the purely veterinary considerations which until now had preoccupied him.
    â€œI’ll goo down to the house and get my missus,” he said aloud over his shoulder, and set off at a trot. But before he had got a couple of yards, a new sound altogether cut through the morning.
    It was the great, first cry; always familiar, yet always terrible. It rang out challengingly over the busy growing world. Loud andtriumphant and furious. An angry bellow from the ever-returning conqueror of the earth come back again to battle for his inheritance. Another reinforcement from the inexhaustible reserve.
    Jason waited, and Larch’s voice, delighted as it always was at such times, answered the question that had been in his mind.
    â€œA little old boy!” he was shouting amid the roaring, “a little old boy! Come up my dearie, come up my lady, come up my smart, pretty girl. A great, shouting little old boy; fine and fierce as a little old bull. Holler, my little old ’un; holler, will ’ee. Do ’ee good, and won’t hurt I!”
    At noon when Galantry was asleep in his chair with his jaw dropped like a dead man’s, and Shulie and the baby were sleeping too, with the hated curtains torn down round the naked bed, the sun was up and the doors were open and the regular, sensible ritual of an ordered, civilized day was in full swing once more.
    Pale after the night’s insufferable affront, Dorothy met Richard in the hall.
    â€œNot a sign of fever. Not a scratch on the boy, and not a sneeze in either of them,” she said, continuing aloud the indignant harangue which had been going on in her mind for the best part of six hours. “But God knows what sort of a man he’ll be after a start like that.”
    â€œThat’s his look-out,” said Richard, adding with the finality and brutality of his kind, age and country: “He can’t never be a gentleman. That’s one thing certain sure.”

Chapter Four
    They christened him James; partly because it seemed a good manly name, but also because as far as Galantry knew, no one in the family had ever borne it, and so no one could possibly be offended.
    James never altered it, even when he altered his surname, and he never allowed anyone to call him Jimmy. But nevertheless, for the whole of his life he privately considered it a low, inferior sort of name, just as the name William was always surrounded in his mind with a quite unreasonable halo of importance and superiority.
    It was typical of him that he never did get away from this idiotic piece of mental rubbish, and it never occurred to him to do anything about it save to accept it as a natural evil. That was the Shulie in him.It used to make him laugh though sometimes, and that was old Will Galantry in him. On the whole these two settled down very peaceably in the boy, though that belongs to later in the story.
    Until he was seven years and nine months old, the young James firmly believed he had inherited the earth. There was little to prevent