"Well, she has a sort of rheumatics that the least damp affects, and so she's the best barometer in this part of the country. She's eighty, and has been used to weather observation so long, she can tell what's coming--hail, or snow, or rain to a T. That old man leaning on the gate, he's Francis, the village lunatic, he's just ninety; fine days he crawls down to Ditchingham cross-roads to wait for the soldiers coming back from the Crimea. I call that pathetic, but they only laugh at it here. He must have waited for them when he was a boy and seen them marching along, and now he goes and waits for them--makes me feel s'if I could cry. Here's a shilling for you, Francis; Miss Pamela is knitting you some socks--good-day--poor old thing! Let's see now, those cottages are all work-people's, and there's nothing beyond, only the road, and it's dusty, and I vote to go back. Why, there's that old scamp of a Francis making a bee-line for the 'Hand in Hand'; n'mind, I won't have to wear his head in the morning." Miss Morgan chatted all the way back uninterruptedly, disclosing a more than comprehensive knowledge of all the affairs of the village in which she had lived some ten days or less. At the gate of "The Roost" she stopped suddenly. "My, what a pity!" "What's the matter?" "Nothing; only I might have called and seen Mrs Harmer. She has such a pretty daughter, and I'd have liked you to have seen her, for she's the image of Fanny Lambert." She stared full at Mr Bevan as she said this, and there was a something in her tone and a something in her manner, and a something in her glance that made Charles Bevan lose control of his facial capillaries and blush. "Fanny's cooked him," thought the lady of the blue eyes as she retired to dress for dinner. "But what in the nation did he mean by saying he did not know her?" "What the deuce made her say that in such a way?" asked Mr Bevan of himself as he assumed the clothes laid out for him by the careful Strutt. CHAPTER III A CURE FOR BLINDNESS "The British thoroughbred is not played out by any means. Look at the success of imported blood all over the world. Look at Phantom, the grandsire of Voltaire, and Bay Middleton----" Mr Bevan paused. He was addressing George Lambert, and suddenly found that he was addressing the entire dinner-table in one of those hiatuses of conversation in which every tongue is suddenly held. "Yes," said Hamilton-Cox, continuing some desultory remarks on literature, in general, into which this eruption of stud book had broken; "but you see the old French ballads are for the most part by the greatest of all poets, Time. Beside those the greatest modern poems seem gaudy and Burlington Arcady, if I may use the expression. An old folk-song that has been handed from generation to generation, played on, so to speak, like an old fiddle by all sorts of hands, gains a sweetness and richness never imagined by the simple-minded person who wrote it or invented it.