Anne stirred a saucepan thoughtfully. She did not believe Alf: for she knew that Ernie was far too much his father's son to be bought disgracefully, and she remembered suddenly a suggestion that Mr. Pigott had lately thrown out to the effect that Alf himself had not been altogether proof against the seductions of this seductive young woman his brother had won. It struck her now that there might be something in the story after all, unlikely as it seemed: for she remarked that Alf always pursued his sister-in-law with the covert rancour and vindictiveness of the mean spirit which has met defeat. But however doubtful she might be in her own heart of Alf's tale, the essential facts about Ruth were not in dispute: her daughter-in-law was the mother of an illegitimate child and had settled down with that child not a quarter of a mile away. Everybody knew the story, especially of course the neighbours she would least wish to know it--the Archdeacon and Lady Augusta in the Rectory across the way. For over thirty years Anne had lived in her solid little blue-slated house, the ampelopsis running over its good red face, the tobacco plants sweet on summer evenings in the border round the neat and tidy lawn, holding her nose high, too high her enemies averred, and priding herself above all women on her respectability--and now! No wonder Ernie, bringing home his bride and his disgrace, infuriated her. "Shamin me afore em all!" she muttered time and again with sullen wrath to the pots and pans she banged about on the range. She never saw the offender now except on Sundays when he came up to visit his father, which he did as regularly as in the days before his marriage. The ritual of these visits was always the same. Ernie would come in at the front-door; she would give him a surly nod from the kitchen; he would say quietly--"Hullo, mum!" and turn off into the study where his dad was awaiting him. The two, Anne remarked with acrimony, grew always nearer and--what annoyed her most--talked always less. Edward Caspar was an old man now, in body if not in years; and on the occasion of Ernie's visits father and son rarely strolled out to take the sun on the hill at the back or lounge in the elusive shade of Paradise as in former days. They were content instead to sit together in the austere little study looking out on to the trees of the Rectory, Lely's famous _Cavalier_, the first Lord Ravensrood, glancing down from the otherwise bare walls with wistful yet ironic eyes on his two remote descendants enjoying each other beneath in a suspicious communion of silence. Thus Anne always found the pair when she brought them their tea; and the mysterious intimacy between the two was all the more marked because of her husband's almost comical unawareness of his second son. The genuine resentment Anne experienced in the matter of Edward's unvarying attitude towards his two sons she visited, regardless of justice, upon Alf.