Pete fixed upon his father a gaze meant to inspire the utmost terrors of conscience, then turned on his heel and slowly walked away. The sight of his broad black back disappearing among the hop-bines was too much for Reuben. He picked up the can of insect-killer and hurled it after his son, splashing his respectability from head to foot with the stinking fluid. Pete flung round with his fists up, then suddenly dropped them and raised his eyes instead. "You wudn't daur do that if I hadn't been saved!" he shouted. Then he walked off, beautiful of soul no doubt, but highly unpleasant of body. BOOK VII THE END IN SIGHT § 1. The next five years were comparatively uneventful. All that stood out of them was the steady progress of the farm. It fattened, it grew, it crept up Boarzell as the slow tides softly flood a rock. Reuben was now alone at Odiam with his two small children and Harry. David and Bill, unlike their predecessors, did not start their career as farm-hands till well past babyhood. Reuben no longer economised in labour--he had nearly a dozen men in regular employ, to say nothing of casuals. Sometimes he thought regretfully of the stalwart sons who were to have worked for him, to have run the farm without any outside help ... but that dream belonged to bygone days, and he resolutely put it from him. After all, his posse of farm-hands was the envy of the neighbourhood; no one in Peasmarsh employed so many. Reuben himself was still able for a great deal of work. Though over sixty, he still had much of the vigour, as he had all the straightness, of his youth. Work had not bent him and crippled him, as it had crippled Beatup, his junior by several years. The furnace of his pride and resolution seemed to have dried the damps steamed up by the earth from her revengeful wounds, so that rheumatism--the plague of the labourer on the soil--had done no worse for him than shooting pains in the winter with a slight thickening of his joints. His hair had been grey for years, and as he grew older it did not whiten, but stayed the colour of polished iron, straight, shining, and thick as a boy's. He had lost two back teeth, and made a tremendous fuss about them, saying it was all the fault of the dentist in Rye, who preferred a shilling extraction to a threepenny lotion--but the rest of his teeth were as good as ever, though at last a trifle discoloured by smoking. His face was a network of wrinkles. He was not the sort of countryman whose skin old age stretches smoothly over the bones and reddens benignly as a sun-warmed apple. On the contrary, he had grown swarthier with the years, the ruddy tints had been hardened into the brown, and from everywhere, from the corners of his eyes, of his mouth, of his nose, across his forehead, along his cheeks, under his chin, spread a web of lines, some mere hair-tracery on the surface, others wrinkled deep, others ploughed in like the furrows of his own fields.