Nevertheless, he found time to do many little odd jobs for her which he could not have accomplished in the shooting season: knocking together shelves, digging in the garden, chopping up the store of wood which she herself collected as she strolled out in her spare hours. Betty was as happy as a bird in those days. Their new home had been put in order before their advent, and was spick and span from roof to threshold; the fresh thatch glinted bravely through the heavy summer foliage; the flowers in the little garden made patches of bright colour amid the surrounding green. Betty herself in her print dress and with her hair shining like polished gold, Betty carrying her six-months-old child poised on her round arm, was an almost startling figure to those who came upon her suddenly in the leafy aisles about her home. Brown and grey and fawn and russet are the tones chiefly affected by forest people; yet here were the mother and child, wood creatures both of them, flaunting it in their pinks and yellows before autumn had so much as crimsoned a leaf. What wonder that the shy folk in fur or feather peered at them with round astonished eyes, ere scuttling to cover or taking to flight. Dick Tuffin, the woodman, looked up in surprise from the faggot he had just bound together, when Betty and her baby-boy came towards him one sunny morning from one of the many shadowy avenues which abutted on a glade cleared by his own hands. As she advanced, he sat back upon his heels amid the slender sappy victims of his axe, and frankly stared at her. He was a young man, dark as a gipsy, muscular and lithe, with quick-glancing eyes and a flashing smile. “Good-day,” said Betty, pausing civilly. “Good-day to you, Mum. I d’ ’low you be new keeper’s wife?” “Yes, I am Mrs. Whittle,” said Betty. “Are you cutting down my husband’s woods?” she added, smiling. “Ah! your husband’s woods ’ud not be in sich good order as they do be if it wasn’t for I an’ sich as I,” returned the man. “I do cut down a piece reg’lar every year, an’ then the young growth comes, d’ye see, twice so thick as before, so that the game can find so much shelter as they do like.” “And what are you going to do with all these poor little trees?” inquired Betty. “They are too green for firewood, aren’t they?” “Well,” said Dick, with his infectious smile, “I make hurdles wi’ ’em for one thing, an’ some of ’em goes for pea-sticks, an’ others is made into besoms. They mid be green,” he added reflectively, “but folks do come here often enough a-pickin’ up scroff for burnin’.” Here the child on Betty’s arm began to whimper, and she nodded to it and dandled it, her own person keeping up a swaying, dancing movement the while. Dick Tuffin watched her, at first with a smile; but presently his face clouded.