Though he had spent, on and off, some years in Rye, he had seen very little of the surrounding country, and did not know that Odiam was the farm of his adventure. Caro had told him her name, and he had heard of Ben Backfield, but did not remember much about him. The episode did not affect him very deeply. At dinner he asked his aunt the name of Backfield's farm, and forgot it as he walked down Wish Ward that evening, wearing his best guernsey and breeches, his hands in his pockets, his pipe in his mouth, his earrings glittering in the forest of his hair. His headache had passed off, and he felt a man again; so he sought the woman. She lived in a small old house wedged tight between two new ones; her window was dark, and her threshold silent, though he knocked again and again. He walked up and down once or twice in front of the cottage whistling "Ropes and Rum"--perhaps she had gone to do some shopping; he saw himself sitting down to a feast of pickled herrings in her kitchen. Then when he was about a hundred feet from the house the door opened stealthily and a man slunk out. The gleam of a street lamp passed over his face, and Dansay rushed at him with his fists up. The story of Joe Dansay has nothing to do with us except so far as it affects Caro Backfield, so there will be no digression to explain why he and Albert Cock fought each other up and down Wish Ward till the police came running up and hauled them off to gaol. The next morning he came before the magistrate, and was fined ten shillings and costs or fourteen days. He was able to find the money, but it was not the fine which made him drag his footsteps and hang his head as he walked home, it was the sight of his victim of the night before leaving the court arm-in-arm with a certain pretty witness. Evening came, the dusk fell, stars floated up out of the mists that piled themselves along the shore, the bleat of sheep came from the marsh, and the eye of Dungeness Lighthouse flashed off the Point into the fogs. Inland the country was wrapt in a tender haze, perfumed with hops and harvest. The moon rose above the Fivewatering, and bronzed the dark masses of wood huddling northward. The scented wind seemed to sigh to him of a woman's hair and lips, of the softness of a woman's hand in his, of her silly little voice talking love and nonsense. But the house in Wish Ward was shut to him--perfidious woman had added yet another perfidy to her score. For about the twentieth time his love dream had been shattered. Now she was eating pickled herrings with another man. A kind of defiance, a kind of swagger possessed him. He would show her and himself how little he cared. He would find another woman this very night. He remembered the dark-browed, demure little thing of the farmhouse gate. He would go back to her, and she would not be so timid this time--they never were. § 6. "Oh, I thought you wur never coming back."