“O’ course father were allers fust.” And wearily the mother repeated: “Yes, father were allers fust.” HIS LITTLE MAID HIS LITTLE MAID The waning of the hot midsummer day spread its mellow sunlight and its long shadows across the marsh-land beside the sea. The haymakers had been busy since daybreak; men, women and children labouring through the hot hours, when the whole level was one scarcely varied monotony of golden haze on soft-green meadows and pastures that grew yellower as they neared the yellow beach; when the sun caked the pale brown earth in the furrows between the crops and drew faint odours from the rush-grown banks of the dykes where the moor-hen hid and the yellow iris bloomed; when the blue waves sparkled, and the shots and shades of the shallows purpled beneath the sun shining on the sea, and brought the only sense of freshness that came to the sun-steeped plain. But now slender amethyst clouds barred the horizon and shed parallel shadows where the sky and sea melted together; the long line of white foreland to left grew clearer beneath the slanting rays; the sun was near to setting and the labourers were near to their rest. Tom Wycombe stood beside the last waggon upon which he had just helped to hoist the last load of hay. It was not his own land, though he had his bit up on the hill behind the old gateway of the ancient town. But he had given his day’s work to a farmer, as many another neighbour had done likewise. He was a man somewhere near fifty on its wrong side, square and fair and rough-visaged, but the neighbours said kind of heart though sparing of speech. But then he was a widower, and it was said he had never been the same man since he had become so, saving all his words and all his gentleness for his little mite of a motherless daughter—all the kin that he had. As he stood now, wiping his brow with his hand, he glanced about him as though seeking something, and a woman guessing his mind, answered the unasked question, “She be down by the river,” she said, “with farmer Daring’s lad.” The man looked uneasy. “Ain’t no one looking after ’em?” asked he. The woman smiled. “Ye be over timid about that child, Mr. Wycombe,” she said. “Ye cosset ’er more than her mother would ha’ done. And ye didn’t ought to, ye know. You’ll make ’er that tender and fearsome, she won’t be fit to stand up to the world.” The man did not reply; he turned away to give a last hoist to the hay as the waggon moved off. He was used to these remarks from kindly busy-bodies, and he never paid more than scant attention to them, but went his own way as he listed. “’E be downright silly over ’er, that’s what ’e be,” declared the woman confidentially to a girl who had been working beside her. “Be ’e ’er dad?” asked the girl, who was a stranger in the parish. The woman laughed. “What makes ye ask that?” said she.