Perhaps it was also the presence of Abner that made George Malpas take unusual notice of his wife. He treated her very much as he would have treated the children or the dog when the fancy took him, but his faintly patronising tone only appeared to embarrass her. When she gave him his tea he would have kissed her, but she stiffened slightly and even blushed, so that Abner could see the colour rising in her white neck. Later she softened a little from her seriousness and the children too, realising that Abner was no more than an ordinary mortal, began to raise their voices. They sat on with the door open in the mellow evening light, and an atmosphere of homeliness and quiet descended on the room so happily that Morgan cried when his mother told him that it was time for bed. During all the afternoon she had scarcely spoken to Abner, and she seemed relieved to find a chance of escape. She puzzled him. In his life he had only known one woman intimately, and that was Alice. He could not help comparing the two of them. The cleanliness and refinement of Mary Malpas became exaggerated by this comparison. Instinctively, at first, he had allowed himself to be influenced by George’s treatment of her, but her aloofness and reserve now made him feel that she was in some subtle way superior. He could not say that he liked her; but he wondered, none the less, what she was made of. She disappeared upstairs and he and George sat on smoking in the twilight. The sun had fallen like a plummet behind the western hills; the valley now lay in deep shadow and only the upper air was overspread with films of light. Night fell. Down in the valley a night-jar began his mechanical trilling. Over by Mawne, in Dovehouse Fields, a hundred miles away, another night-jar was beginning. A sense of new and settled happiness descended on Abner. He had come, it seemed, to another stage in his pilgrimage. Wolfpits was not like one of the bivouacs in which he had sheltered with Mick Connor during this crowded week, but a resting place. He felt that the future need not trouble him, that his feet were firmly planted on this new soil. The only tie that held him to the past was the memory of Alice, so strangely awakened by the presence of this other, and so different, woman. He feared that there could be no such happiness for her. Lying in bed in that strange room he decided that as soon as he had earned some money he would send it to her. At least it was his duty to return her the two sovereigns that she had slipped into his pocket when he left her. Yet, when he remembered the life at Mawne against which he had fretted for so long, his heart was thankful for this release. He fell asleep. The Twelfth Chapter