"Oh, it was true, and no mistake; and, child though I was at the time, I cried through half one night with rage when they told me what the hussy had said in court about my father using the stuff as manure and her begging him not to! Begging him not to, indeed! I could have told them a very different story. And it was Pugwalker that was at the back of that business, and got the granary key from her, so they could run their goods there. And shortly before my father died he got wind of it--I know that from something I overheard. The room I shared with my little brother Robin opened into theirs, and we always kept the door ajar, because Robin was a timid child, and fancied he couldn't go to sleep unless he heard my father snoring. Well, about a week before my father died I heard him talking to her in a voice I'd never known him to use to her before. He said he'd warned her twice already that year, and that this was the last time. Up to that time he'd held his head high, he said, because his hands were clean and all his doings straight and fair, and now he warned her for the last time that unless this business was put a stop to once and for all, he'd have Pugwalker tarred and feathered, and make the neighbourhood too hot for him to stay in it. And, I remember, I heard him hawking and spitting, as if he'd rid himself of something foul. And he said that the Gibbertys had always been respected, and that the farm, ever since they had owned it, had helped to make the people of Dorimare straight-limbed and clean-blooded, for it had sent fresh meat and milk to market, and good grain to the miller, and sweet grapes to the vintner, and that he would rather sell the farm than that poison and filth should be sent out of his granary, to turn honest lads into idiots gibbering at the moon. And then she started coaxing him, but she spoke too low for me to catch the words. But she must have been making him some promise, for he said gruffly, 'Well, see that it's done, then, for I'm a man of my word.' "And in not much more than a week after that he was dead--poor father. And I count it a miracle that I ever grew up and am sitting here now telling you all this. And a still greater one that little Robin grew up to be a man, for he inherited the farm. But it was her own little girl that died, and Robin grew up and married, and though he died in his prime it was through a quinsy in his throat, and he always got on with our stepmother, and wouldn't hear a word against her. And she has brought up his little girl, for her mother died when she was born. But I've never seen the lass, for there was never any love lost between me and my stepmother, and I never went back to the old house after I married." She paused, and in her eyes was that wistful, tranced look that always comes when one has been gazing at things that happened to one long ago.