“I’d think shame o’ myself to give a visitor owt else.” There was a stress in her voice that made him turn his head, but she was going away from him into the scullery and he could not see her face. Her last words, however, were flung back with the crisp cheerfulness to which he was used. “I’ll be getting they scones buttered while you’re off.... Now don’t be mooning about and miss your time!” She disappeared through the open door, and he was left to his vigil over the marsh. His mind, released from the tie of another in the room, began slowly and toilsomely to go back over old events. Once he sighed sharply, as if oppressed, but it was simply with extraordinary relief. He knew now, from his sudden sense of mental ease, how he had worried and fretted about the old dad. It was as if something he had ignored had been tugging at his coat, and now he could look behind him without fear of what he might see. He was free, or thought himself free, of that troubling episode at his back ... yet wondered ever so vaguely why there should still be a sore place at his heart. It was not as if he regretted anything he had done, or that he would not have been ready to do that particular thing again. There had been only one way for him, and he had taken it, and if it had happened a thousand times he would have taken it still, but nevertheless it had left him with a latent fear of life, a darkening sense of indebtedness to fate. Even now, with the whole business right at last, and the road clear as the stars before his feet, he suffered a faint oppression of the mind. He supposed he would always have a bitter memory of the breaking up of the old home. Even an outsider must have felt it to some extent, an outsider who had had nothing to do with the cause. The old man had taken it so hard and yet with scarcely a word, so painfully like a hurt but yielding child; and he himself had done nothing but stand by, because just at that time he had not been able to help.... When he came to that word “able,” it somehow stuck in his throat.... Anyhow, able or no, he had not helped, that was sure; and so the old man and the home had had to go....