There was a simultaneous outcry; the maidens of Branston and the neighbourhood were apparently each and all in the flower of youth and beauty. Sharp words were exchanged, however. Tom, while defending Rosie from the imputed cast in her eye, took occasion to animadvert on Mary’s carroty locks, and the last-named damsel’s admirer nearly came to blows with Jim on the subject of Chrissy’s age, he asserting that she was a staid girl, while her lover stoutly declared that she was not yet five-and-twenty. Just as the hubbub was at its height, an elderly man, who had been smoking in silent amusement in the corner of the room, remarked that if they were on the look-out for an ill-favoured sort o’ body, a bit on in years, they couldn’t do better than see what could be made of Anne Clarke of the “Roebuck”. “I seed Trooper Willcocks wi’ his arm round her waist t’other day,” he added. “Him an’ a couple more young sparks come in for a glass—and Willcocks had had a drop too much already. He’d got into the way o’ love-making, d’ye see, and she was the only maid handy, so he made up to her, bein’ too far gone to see the difference. If he didn’t begin palaverin’, an’ tellin’ her cock-an’-bull stories about his adventures out there at the war, and how he longed for faymale love an’ sympathy. His arm was round her waist, I tell ’ee, before his first pint was drunk!” Samuel Cross jumped off the table, his little eyes dancing in his head. “The very thing,” he cried rapturously. “Boys, we’ll make a grand job of this. It will work up to a lovely case. But Mum’s the word, remember—the game will be spoilt if a hint of it gets out. Cheer up, lovers all, you’ll get your sweethearts back, I promise you. If Trooper Willcocks doesn’t show a clean pair of heels before long, I’m a Dutchman.” The Roebuck Inn was a somewhat dreary-looking little hostelry, about a mile away from the town of Branston. It was situated in a kind of fold in the downs, a hollow between two vast undulating tracts of green. A handful of thatched cottages flanked it, and the river ran so near that the premises of the Roebuck were regularly flooded once or twice a year when “the springs rose”. The landlord of the little tumble-down place took these visitations very philosophically: indeed it was noticeable that his spirits were uplifted in proportion to the rising of the springs, knowing, as he had reason to do, that this watery rising habitually produced elevation of another kind among his customers. For when one’s fields are flooded and one’s spirits damped, one is all the better able to appreciate an exhilarating glass, particularly when that glass is partaken of under peculiar and mirth-producing circumstances.