He had so seldom ridden in a trap that had an empty seat that it made him ashamed to pass anybody in the road. He had never been proud about taking lifts himself, and nobody had been proud about taking them from him. He had been one of those folk who go packed like herring to market or fair, with somebody sitting on the nearside splashboard and the driver cosily wedged against the rail. Even if he started from home with only a passenger or two, he would be sure to collect others before he had gone far. Sometimes one of the squires had clambered into the trap and held the fiddle while Christopher held the reins. Somebody always held the fiddle when the squash was great, and the sensitive thing was happy in their hands, because, rough or smooth, they held it like fine glass. But the lasses held it like the lace of a bridal veil, because of the secret things it had danced into their hearts. Down in the road again they would beckon Kit to stoop, and beg for a certain tune at a certain dance—“Dally an’ dree,” perhaps, come Saturday night, or “Ask and I’ll tell you, my lad,” at Huddleston clip. He always promised without a smile, and he never once forgot. Always he kept the tune for the lass, however he was begged, until the lad he was sure she wanted led her out. Fiddles, he thought to himself, as he drove, had been more loved than anything else in the world. There were folks who loved precious stones and sold their souls for them and gave their lives, but surely that was a form of daftness and not love. And some loved books and held them gently in their hands—he had seen a parson or two do that and one of the squires. But most of the books died very soon, and if they lived they were like folks of a great age, telling you plainly to leave them alone with the past. Those that came again came always in a different dress, and even the words inside were not always the same. And some loved ships and horses and gave them their whole hearts, but neither a ship nor a horse lived for so very long. The ship went down in a storm, or grew rotten and gave at her seams, and no loved animal ever came to a man twice. But fiddles went on for ever and ever, and generally somebody loved them all the time. It was the right sort of love, too, because nobody could love them in any other way—the sort that touches a loved thing lightly, and yet thrills to it all through. It was true that sometimes they got to the wrong homes, but you did not find them in terrible houses like Marget’s, as a rule. And it was true that most folk didn’t know how to use them, and that most folk didn’t care, but it could only be just a few who wanted to do them harm. Marget’s vehement hatred had had something abnormal at its back which had hurt him infinitely more than any insult to himself. He had never thought of the fiddle before except as an object of tenderness and pride; never once, in all his days, had he even seen it despised by a look. Why, the lasses