He pointed to one of a little row of villas on the left which looked over the allotment gardens to the Downs. "That's where Mr. Pigott lives now. My school-master he were that time o day." "Who's Mr. Pigott?" Ruth asked. Ernie rootled her with a friendly elbow. "My guv'nor, stoopid! Manager of the Southdown Transport Company. Him that was at the wedding--with the beard. Settin along o Mrs. Trupp." "Oh, Mr. _Pigott_!" answered Ruth. Now that the strain of the last two years was over at last, she brimmed over with a demure naughtiness. "Well, why couldn't you say so, then? You _are_ funny, men are." The cart climbed the steep hill to Billing's Corner and Ernie looked down the familiar road to the Rectory and even caught a peep of the back of his old home. Then they turned down Church Street with its old-world fragrance of lavender and yesterday. On the left the parish-church, long-backed and massive-towered upon the Kneb, brooded over the centuries it had seen come and go. "Dad says the whole history of Beachbourne's centred there," said Ernie in awed voice. "Steeped in it, he says." Ernie, who had been leaning forward to peep at the Archdeacon posed in the entrance of St. Michael's, now dropped back suddenly, nudging his companion. A lean woman with white hair and wrathful black eyebrows, her complexion still delicate as a girl's, was coming up the hill. "Mother," whispered Ernie. It was Ruth's turn to raise the flap and peer forth stealthily at the figure passing so close and so unconsciously on the pavement. So that was the woman who had opposed her marriage with such malevolent persistency! Ruth observed her enemy with more curiosity than hostility, and received a passing impression of a fierce unhappy face. "She don't favour you no-ways," she said, as she relapsed into a corner. "Where's dad though?" Ernie shook his head. "He's never with her," he said. "I ca-a-n't call to mind as ever I've seen them out together, not the pair of them." "I'd ha liked him to have been at the wedding," murmured Ruth a thought discontentedly. "And he'd ha liked it too, I'll lay," Ernie answered. "Only she'd never have let him." The cart stopped; and the two passengers descended at the old _Star_ opposite the Manor-house, which bore the plate of Mr. William Trupp, the famous surgeon. On the Manor-house steps a tall somewhat cadaverous man was standing. He was so simply dressed as almost to be shabby; and his straw hat, tilted on the back of his head, disclosed a singularly fine forehead. There was something arresting about the man and his attitude: a delicious mixture of mischievous alertness and philosophical detachment. He might have been a mediæval scholar waiting at the door of his master; or a penitent seeking absolution; or, not least, a youth about to perpetrate a run-away knock.