It was as if someone had suddenly laid a cold hand on Robert's heart. He guessed that his father suspected him. His ears turned crimson, and his hands trembled and fumbled as he opened the back of the cart and took out his string of properly skinned and gutted conies. Reuben counted them--ten. Then he pushed them aside, and began rummaging in the cart among cabbages and bags of apples. In a second or two he had dragged out five more rabbits. Robert stood with hanging head, flushed cheeks, and quivering hands, till his father fulfilled his expectations by knocking him down. "So that's the way you queer me, you young villain. You steal, you hide, you try to bust the farm. It's luck you're even a bigger fool than you are scamp, and I've caught you justabout purty." He kicked Robert, and called up Richard to drive the cart over to Rye. An hour later the whole of the boy's plans, and worse still his sinews of war, were in the enemy's possession. Reuben ransacked his son's mind as easily as he ransacked his pockets and the careful obvious little hiding-place under his mattress where lay the twenty-two shillings of which he had defrauded Odiam. His love for Bessie, his degraded and treacherous hopes, filled the father with shame. Had he then lived so meanly that such mean ambitions should inspire his son? "A cowman's girl!" he groaned, "at Eggs Hole, too, where they döan't know plums from damsons! Marry her! I'd sooner have Albert and his wenches." "I love her," faltered Robert. "Well, you'll justabout have to stop loving her, that's all. I'm not going to have my place upset by love. Love's all very well when there's something wud it or when there's nothing in it. But marrying cowmen's girls wudout a penny in their pockets, we can't afford to kip that sort o' love at Odiam." "Fäather," pleaded Robert, "you loved my mother." "Yes--but she wur a well-born lady wud a fortun. D'you think I'd have let myself love her if she'd bin poor and a cowman's daughter? Not me, young feller!" "But you can't help loving, surelye." "Well, if that's wot you think, the sooner you find out that you can help loving the better. Did I ever hear such weak womanish slop! Help loving? You'll help it before you're many days older. Meantime you kip away from that girl, and all them hemmed choir-singings which are the ruin of young people." The colour rushed into Robert's cheeks, and something very unfamiliar and very unmanly into his eyes. "I'll----" he began desperately. But even Robert had the wit not to finish his sentence. § 11.