All flushed with pity she realised the bitterness of his fate--he who was so young and strong and clean and gay, had been degraded, shamed by her father, whom in that moment she looked upon entirely as a brute. It must not be. He had been so good to her, so friendly and courteous in their Sunday walks--she must not let him go away from her shamed and beaten. She gathered up her skirts and ran across the garden, out on to the Moor. She ran through the heather, stumbling in the knotted thickness. The spines tore her stockings, and in one clump she lost her shoe. But she did not wait. Her little chin was thrust forward in the obstinacy of her pursuit, and when she came closer to him she called--"Mr. Realf! Mr. Realf!" He stopped and looked round, and the next minute she was at his side. Her hair was all blown about her face, her cheeks were flushed the colour of bell-heather, and her breast heaved like a wave. She could not speak, but her eyes were blessing him, and then suddenly both her hands were in his. § 6. Early in the next year Sir Miles Bardon died, and his son Ralph became Squire. Reuben had now, as he put it, lived through three Bardons. He despised the enfeebled and effete race with its short life-times, and his own body became straighter when he thought of Sir Miles's under the earth. For every reason now, Odiam was being forced on. Realf had sought comfort for his personal humiliation in making his farm more spick and span than ever. Reuben became aware of a certain untidiness about Odiam, and spent much on paint and tar--just as the frills of a younger rival might incite to extravagance a woman who had hitherto despised the fashions. He painted his waggons a beautiful blue, and his oasts were even blacker and shinier than Grandturzel's. He had wooden horses to dance on their pointers, whereupon Realf put cocks on his. The thought of Tilly did not check the young man in this beggar-my-neighbour, for he knew that her father's ambition meant her slavery. So when Reuben added a prize Jersey heifer to his stock, Realf bought a Newlands champion milker, and when Reuben launched desperately on a hay-rope twister, Realf ran him up with a wurzel-cutter. Finally Reuben bought twenty acres, of Boarzell, in which Realf did not attempt to rival him, for he already had forty which he did not know what to do with. Reuben's strugglings with Boarzell struck him as pathetic rather than splendid, an aberration of ambition which would finally spoil the main scheme.