Borlase, looking round and noting with appreciation the exceptional cleanliness and tidiness of the cottage, never dreamt that extreme poverty lurked here. He had still to learn that they are often the poorest who make the greatest efforts to appear least so, and that there are women who manage a clean collar round their throats when they have not a loaf of bread in the cupboard. The Marlowes were away, and there was no soup-kitchen at the Hall that winter for those labourers on the estate who cared to take advantage of it and no Miss Cynthia to inquire after wife, husband, or children, and make notes of necessities in a little morocco-leather note-book, which many knew well and had cause to bless. Anna Hugo was also away on one of her visits to Rocozanne. There was no one to befriend them. It was useless to go to Mrs. Severn; and his heart was sore at the remembrance of various rebuffs in his courtship which he had had from Dinah Constantine. Dinah had thought Priscilla was throwing herself away; she knew her value and begrudged losing her services. The more desperate he became, the more he shrank from asking help. One day, as he trudged back from Wonston with medicine, his dog caught a hare in a hedge. He pocketed it and made Scilla some soup. This was before the days of the Ground Game Acts, when it was a penalty to touch a rabbit whose burrow was on the land a man rented. Kit snared a few rabbits first. Almost every man at the Mires did the same and the Admiral knew it. But they did it in a clumsy fashion that raised no fears of more ambitious depredations. Kit, however, soon found that there was an art in the practice and a blood-warming risk in its pursuit. The grouse season was just out for that winter, but there were other birds whose close time was not so strictly preserved. By the time Priscilla was strong again he had acquired a skill that absorbed him and had bent every resource of his mind to its success as a trade. She knew nothing, but Hartas knew all. They stored their spoil in a dub in the ling near the coal-pit, and the following winter this spoil was grouse.