When these uncomfortable thoughts assailed her she plunged fiercely into work, clicking her needle and thimble through new calico, or darting about the rambling house with a duster. She was pathetically anxious to earn her salary, to be absolutely independent of Jethro’s charity. She had not yet decided whether her torn heart would allow her to marry him when the time came. One morning he strolled down the weedy gravel path of the oblong kitchen-garden, with the holly hedge as wall on all four sides, and the holly arch as postern at the entrance. There were grass paths between the beds: they wanted mowing and leveling. The wide herbaceous borders were full of weeds. The gravel path going straight from one end to the other was a harmony in green and yellow. There was a gardener at Folly Corner, but Gainah made him clean boots, chop wood, and carry buckets; while Jethro made him drive and groom the horses, and pressed him into service when he was short of hands on the farm. Consequently the garden was unattended. Scarlet pimpernel was vivid on the dry ground, bindweed bound round the cabbage-stalks, and wild clumps of blazing corn marigold bloomed unheeded. Pamela was loitering in an archway of dead scarlet-runners, collecting seed, by Gainah’s orders. Gainah was mistress of the garden. Jethro came along the alley in his thick brown boots. His hands were in his breeches pockets; a Michaelmas daisy, which he had pulled from the border as he strolled, was in his mouth. He looked at Pamela, half tenderly, half quizzically--a look which always set her pulses throbbing. She could never forget, when she was alone with him, the piquant circumstances which had brought her under his roof. Sometimes when Gainah imposed distasteful tasks her neck would swell, and she told herself proudly that by next autumn she could, if she chose, be mistress of Folly Corner. Her basket was three parts full of seed-pods--like the fingers of dainty gloves stretched over bones. As she moved the seeds made a dice-like rattle. Jethro took the basket from her and begun to pull the pods off the dry yellow stalks himself. “You shouldn’t be at this work,” he said, lifting her white hand with his free one. “Why can’t Daborn do it?” “Gainah likes to see to these things herself.” “You must be mistress over Gainah.” “Not yet,” she broke out involuntarily, and then flushed. Jethro laughed. “I’m glad you put it that way. Evidently we are of the same mind. Suppose we say six months instead of a year, Cousin Pamela.” “No, no! A year, as we decided.” She looked vaguely through the wasted tendrils of the dead beans as they clung to the sticks--looked in the direction of London. Jethro had once said carelessly London was that way, jerking his broad brown thumb widely. After that, she looked across the common whenever that chill thought of the prison stole in and numbed her brain.