William lay at length, his body resting on one arm. He held a long grass stalk between his small, discoloured teeth. The conversation had fallen. He looked at Esther; she sat straight up, her stiff cotton dress spread over the rough grass; her cloth jacket was unbuttoned. He thought her a nice-looking woman and he imagined her behind the bar of the "King's Head." His marriage had proved childless and in every way a failure; he now desired a wife such as he felt sure she would be, and his heart hankered sorely after his son. He tried to read Esther's quiet, subdued face. It was graver than usual, and betrayed none of the passion that choked in her. She must manage that the men should not meet. But how should she rid herself of him? She noticed that he was looking at her, and to lead his thoughts away from herself she asked him where he had gone with his wife when they left Woodview. Breaking off suddenly, he said-- "Peggy knew all the time I was gone on you." "It don't matter about that. Tell me where you went--they said you went foreign." "We first went to Boulogne, that's in France; but nearly everyone speaks English there, and there was a nice billiard room handy, where all the big betting men came in of an evening. We went to the races. I backed three winners on the first day--the second I didn't do so well. Then we went on to Paris. The race-meetings is very 'andy--I will say that for Paris--half-an-hour's drive and there you are." "Did your wife like Paris?" "Yes, she liked it pretty well--it is all the place for fashion, and the shops is grand; but she got tired of it too, and we went to Italy." "Where's that?" "That's down south. A beast of a place--nothing but sour wine, and all the cookery done in oil, and nothing to do but seeing picture-galleries. I got that sick of it I could stand it no longer, and I said, 'I've 'ad enough of this. I want to go home, where I can get a glass of Burton and a cut from the joint, and where there's a horse worth looking at.'" "But she was very fond of you. She must have been." "She was, in her way. But she always liked talking to the singers and the painters that we met out there. Nothing wrong, you know. That was after we had been married about three years." "What was that?" "That I caught her out." "How do you know there was anything wrong? Men always think bad of women." "No, it was right enough! she had got dead sick of me, and I had got dead sick of her. It never did seem natural like. There was no 'omeliness in it, and a marriage that ain't 'omely is no marriage for me. Her friends weren't my friends; and as for my friends, she never left off insulting me about them. If I was to ask a chap in she wouldn't sit in the same room with him. That's what it got to at last. And I was always thinking of you, and your name used to come up when we was talking. One day she said, 'I suppose you are sorry you didn't marry a servant?' and I said, 'I suppose you are sorry you did?'"