It was fitting that a man like Pendoggat should live among the furze, farm in the furze, fight with the furze. He resembled it in its fierceness, its spitefulness, its tenacity of life; but not in its beauty and fragrance. He brought forth no golden blossoms. There was no thorn-protected fragrance in him. He was always struggling with the furze, without realising that it must defeat him in the end. He burnt it, but up it came in the spring. He grubbed it up, but portions of the root escaped and sent forth new growth. He would reclaim a patch, but directly he turned his back upon it to attack a fresh piece the furze returned. To eradicate furze upon a moor was not one of the labours allotted to Hercules. He would have found it worse than cutting off the heads of the water-snake. Pendoggat had fought for twenty years, and the enemy was still undefeated; he would die, and the gorse would go on; for he was only a hardy annual, and the gorse is a perennial, as eternal as the rivers and the granite. It bristled upon every side of the Barton, the greater gorse as well as the lesser, and it was in flower all the year round, as though boasting of its indomitable strength and vitality. On the west side, where the moorland dipped and made an opening for the winds from Tavy Cleave, a long narrow brake remained untouched to make a shelter for the house. The gorse there was high and thick, and its ropy stems were as big round as a man's wrist. Pendoggat would have grievously assaulted any man who dared to fire that brake. People who talked scandal in the twin villages, namely, the entire population, wondered whether Mrs. Pendoggat was really as respectable as she looked. They decided against her, as they were not the sort of people to give any one the benefit of a doubt. They were right, however, for Annie Pendoggat had no claim to the latter part of her name. She was really Annie Crocker, a degraded member of one of those three famous families--Cruwys and Copplestone being the other two--who reached their zenith before the Norman invasion. She had come to Pendoggat as housekeeper, and could not get away from him; neither could he dismiss her. She was a little woman, with a sharp face and a soft voice; much too soft, people said. She could insult any one in a manner which suggested that she loved them. She had been fond of her master in her snake-like way. She still admired his brute strength, and what she thought was his courage. He had never lifted up his hand against her; and when he threatened to, she would remark in her soft way that the long brake of gorse darkened the kitchen dreadfully, and she thought she would go and set a match to it. That always brought Pendoggat to his senses.