Yet he bent his head and went down two steps into the editorial offices of the _Liddleshorn Herald_. The place was empty save for a sharp-featured youth who was lounging at the side of the counter. He sharply asked the visitor what he wanted. He was a new importation, an embryo journalist, with a London journal as his goal. He touched the town side of things only. He had a smoldering contempt for farmers, and knew nothing of the master of Folly Corner. Jethro pushed his envelope across the counter with a sheepish gesture. “How many insertions?” asked the youth laconically, yet throwing an amused, curious glance at the big figure which stood near the door--an unconscious, unappreciated color scheme--in white and russet, buff and brown. “How many times in?” The gentleman-farmer’s big, embarrassed laugh seemed to shake the silent place. “Well--once.” As he went slowly out of the town the tinkle of a piano came out clearly from the front room of a little buff villa. There were rows of these buff villas on the outskirts of the town. Some navvies were putting down new drain-pipes. The notes of the piano and the reedy voice of a girl came out slowly, each note isolated and mingled with the nervous tap of the pickax. Jethro stood still and listened. It was a song of Purcell’s: “To make us seek ruin, to make us seek ruin and love those that hate.” He walked on, a queer stirring at his heart. The thin voice of the girl in the villa had touched the romantic spot in him. He thought of that other girl at the inn--plump, blue-eyed, smiling. He thought of his carefully-worded advertisement which, by to-morrow, would be worming its way through Sussex, through Surrey and Hampshire to London perhaps. It was a joke; he began to regret, to blame the cider, or the demure little rings of light hair on the waitress’ unlined brow. And yet he could still hear the piano. He still felt the slow, wondering work of his heart. FOLLY CORNER. CHAPTER I. THE story begins with the emotions of two women--the two women principally concerned--on a morning ten days after Jethro Jayne had imprudently indulged in sweet cider at the market dinner in Liddleshorn. One woman was young--twenty-five or less. She was a big, fair girl; a handsome girl, in the elementary way that satisfies most men. She looked well able to take care of herself; an up-to-date girl, accustomed to fight her way alone, to meet men on their own ground, to jealously look after her own interests. There was, however, an occasional haggard line at her mouth, and in her well-opened, rather prominent gray eyes was a hunted, hopeless look. She wore a coat and skirt, with sleeves of last year’s cut. Her hat was trimmed with strict attention to fashion, and yet bore the brand “home-made.” There was a crisp new veil tied about the brim.