He was kissing Nancy; he meant to marry her. She couldn’t let him do that. She must abandon Jethro. Her life must run side by side with Edred’s. She didn’t care what sort of life--one of poverty, hard work, hard words; blows, perhaps. One of guilty prosperity, winding up with the prison again for him. It didn’t matter--so long as they were together, if only for a little. He didn’t love her. He wasn’t capable, as she knew love. But she loved him, even when she saw him stoop again to those red pouting lips behind the yew. All her rage was for Nancy. Daborn came behind with the trug full of yellow-skinned potatoes. She stepped back and watched him go through the yard, and presently watched Nancy go down the bricked path, mount her bicycle, and skim away like a light swallow. Nancy had forgotten the marked quotation for hay. She could not carry two ideas in that limited head of hers. The world was too gay and warm for Pamela’s blank misery. The hot sun darted into her strained eyes like needles. She went round the house, hugging the lichened wall, her head down, the woolly leaves and spiral tendrils of the vine touching her dull hair. At the garden door she met Gainah, with a flush on her wasted face and a gleam of the old industry and importance in her cold eyes. She was attired in a loose garment of unbleached calico, cut like an antiquated bathing garment. Her skirts were bunched under it. She had a battered straw hat, round which was firmly fixed a veil of green net. A pair of old stockings were pulled over her hands and arms. She carried a tin frying-pan, which she constantly beat with a long iron skimmer. The air was hot and noisy. There seemed an unusual commotion along the line of beehives which were set by the south wall. They were straw skeps, which in winter were covered with turf to keep out the cold. Pamela, who had read up bee-keeping, with other branches of country life, had long decided to have bar-frame hives when she was mistress of Folly Corner. But her knowledge of bees was only theoretical. She was very frightened of them, and the deft, fearless way in which Gainah would take a swarm excited her admiration and made her grudgingly admit that it might be a point of superiority. The angry buzzing grew louder, the monotonous tom-tom beating of the frying-pan and skimmer more persistent. “There’s a swarm over there in the crab-tree,” Gainah said excitedly, forgetting for the time all party feeling. “I must go and take it. They know me. They’ve been talking all the morning; I knew we should have a flitting by dinner-time.” Pamela languidly turned her head. A dark, pear-shaped mass hung from the lower branch of the crab tree in the oat-field.