Jethro would come back to the fire and sink luxuriously into the big horsehair-covered chair with the protecting ears. He would put out his foot in the thick boot and touch the glowing logs. His gun was in the corner just as he had left it when he came in tired and muddy from pheasant shooting. Pamela was afraid of the gun, but it pleased her. It was part of Jethro’s strength and masculinity. So were his careless clothes, and so was his blunt Shaksperean tongue. She liked a man to be frank, a little coarse even, when the man was Jethro. She once thought fancifully that she wouldn’t mind being beaten by a man like that. She already began to regard him as her own possession. She felt a personal pride in him; the very hang of his homespun tweeds on his tough, spare body seemed eloquent of sturdy independence. The yellow firelight glided across the brass rosette-like heads of the fire-dogs. They seemed to wink knowingly at every flicker. Now and again the two hounds in the barn snarled as an infrequent foot came slouching along the wet road, for it was always raining and blowing. Rain, mist, and wind! These were the elements which watched over the slow, reluctant growth of Pamela’s love for big Jethro. Sometimes he read a paragraph from the paper to Gainah--about local doings or people. Sometimes he would ask her advice--about a sale of underwood or the fate of a cow. Sometimes he and Pamela would be left alone for a moment, and then they were both shy. Neither of them forgot that this was a time of probation. Who knew? When the rain and wind and mist of next autumn came they might be man and wife. Autumn grew to winter. She was happy--with a hushed dull happiness that she wished would last forever. No anxieties, no fierce, tearing burst of emotion, gay or sad. She was happy; satisfied with the mild amusements of the simple family connections. They no longer irritated her--these placid, narrow women--slow and heavy, but very useful and harmless. She laughed at Mrs. Clutton’s extravagances, but did not indorse them. She had become very intimate with the dark, sarcastic woman whose husband was abroad. She had her little excitements--skating parties, small dances, occasionally the visit of a dramatic company to Liddleshorn. In this way winter went. The last snow melted into a puddle; the first flowers of March came. She was delighted with the dazzling white of the arabis. Gainah called it snow-on-the-mountains; but Annie Jayne, who brought her baby round in the mail-cart on sunny mornings, said that “dear mother” had always called it March-pride. She ran out frequently to look at the thin green spears which begun to bristle in the borders: these were her bulbs. She spent long hours in her new greenhouse, giving Daborn orders. He was retained exclusively for the garden now, at her wish. There wasn’t a weed to be seen, and every bed was raked and cleaned.