Close to the cottage of the young couple was the lovely old Motcombe garden, public now, pierced by the bourne from which the town derives its name. The garden with its ancient dove-cot, ivy-crowned, its splendid weeping ashes, its ruined walls, compact of native flint and chalk, the skeletons of afore-time barns and byres, stands between the old parsonage house and older parish-church that crowns the Kneb above and, with its massive tower, its squat shingled spire peculiar to Sussex, set four-square to the winds of time, seems lost in a mist of memories. Beyond the church, a few hundred yards further up the hill, at the back of Billing's Corner in Rectory Walk, Ernie's parents still dwelt. Anne Caspar did not visit Ruth. Indeed, she ignored the presence of her daughter-in-law; but those steel-blue eyes of hers sought out and recognized in a hard flash the majestic peasant girl who now haunted Church Street at shopping hours as the woman who had married her son. Ernie's mother was in fact one of those who make it a point of duty, as well as a pleasure, never to forgive. She had neither pardoned Ruth for daring to be her daughter-in-law, nor forgotten her sin. And both offences were immeasurably accentuated by Ruth's crime in establishing herself in the Moot. "Settlin on my door-step," she said. "Brassy slut!" "Just like her," her second son answered; and added with stealthy malice, "Dad visits em. I seen im." Alf, for all his acuteness, had never learned the simple lesson that his mother would not tolerate the slightest criticism of her old man. "And why shouldn't he?" she asked sharply. "Isn't Ern his own flesh-and-blood? _He's_ got a heart, dad has, if some as ought to ave aven't." "No reason at all," answered Alf, looking down his nose. "Why shouldn't he be thick in with her--and with her child for the matter of that? I see him walkin in the Moot the other day near the Quaker meeting-house hand-in-hand with little Alice. Pretty as a Bible picture it struck me." Anne Caspar stared stonily. "Who's little Alice?" she asked. "Her love-child," answered Alf. "Like your grand-child as you might say--only illegit o course." His mother breathed heavily. "Is Ern the father?" she asked at last in a sour flat voice. "Not him!" jeered Alf. "She's a rich man's cast-off, Ruth is. Made it worth Ern's while. That's where it was. See, cash is cash in this world." Anne laid back her ears as she rummaged among her memories, "I thought you told me," she began slowly, "as Ern--" "Never!" cried Alf. "Ern had nothin to do with it, who-ever had." "Who was the father?" asked Anne, not above a little feminine curiosity. Alf shook his head cunningly. "Ah," he said, "now you're askin!" and added after a moment's pause:-- "She was all-the-world's wench one time o day, your daughter was. That's all I can tell you."