He had come to the cottage, as Thomas knew, without any bitterness in his heart. Leaving the farm had meant the end of all things, of course, but as long as he wasn’t bitter there was room for hope, and he had always been able to beautify what he touched. Never once, even in his mind, had he reproached Thomas for condemning him to this. Thomas would have helped him, had it been possible, he felt sure. The lads were all good lads, alive or dead, and there had never been anything wrong between him and them. Marget made a point of telling him very soon that Thomas could have saved him if he had liked, but it passed Kit by like a wasp in a gale of wind. She was always abusing Thomas and Kit’s old friends on the marsh. All the things that were wrong about him came solely from living on the marsh. They were a low lot down there, so Marget said, living like savages all the week, and only at market seeing their fellow-men. They bred wastrels and do-nowts like himself, cracked on fiddling and the like, whom other folk had to keep in their last years. And again she would harp on Thomas and his crime, but she never succeeded in making him understand. Her talk about the marsh and its folk conveyed nothing to old Kit. It was like somebody talking of a country they had never seen. And such a little kindness would have made him content. He was away so much in his own mind that he did not need very much from the folk with whom he lived. And instead of a little kindness he had had a great deal. Women had thought for his comfort all his life, children had always run to him before; and it took him a long time to grasp that things were changed. He had come into the cottage with a trustful smile, but his smile was one of the things that went first. He never forgot that first tempest in Marget’s terrible voice, and the hostile looks of her sly and peering brood. And yet the fact that he could not love them had grown upon him only by degrees. He had never lived with poverty coupled with hate, and he could not grasp its indications for long. But he never learned to love any one of the crowd, any more than he learned to love the chairs.