Working with Abner, or, more exactly, watching Abner work, Joe Munn recovered a little of his broken spirit; but the story of its destruction was older than his experience in the silences of the Forest of Dean. His earliest days had been spent in a double-back house in a Dulston slum, where, half-fed by an aged grandmother, he had made the pallid growth of a potato sprouting in a cellar. Thence he had passed to the children’s ward of Dulston workhouse, being shot out at the age of fourteen to make his best of the world. Even now he laboured, without knowing it, under the shadows and suppressions of those early days. These summer mornings, working with Abner, were the happiest that he had ever known. They became sound friends in a partnership wherein Abner was canonised as a hero and protector, a position which he sustained with an amused tolerance. His relation with George Malpas remained equally happy. They always walked down to work together in the morning, but after that Abner rarely saw his friend, for Wolfpits held no attraction for him, and he preferred to take himself, when the day’s work was over, to the Pound House, or sometimes to the old people at the Buffalo. In a few weeks Abner’s temporary lodging had become a permanency. Mary Malpas, in consultation with her husband, had settled the sum that he should pay for bed and keep, and Wolfpits itself, that sinister and desolate mansion, had become a pleasant and homely place. At first he never accompanied George on his evening visits to the Pound House. It pleased him better to walk home up the valley in the cool of the evening and sluice his head and back beneath a pump of cold spring water that stood in the deserted stable-yard. Then Mary would give him his tea, always with the same air of watchful and remote reserve, and he would smoke his pipe in the garden, talking to the children who, in the confidence of their own secret alliance, were gradually becoming a little more friendly. Or he would play with Spider, who had now learnt to take a place near his chair at meal times in the hope of being fed with scraps from Abner’s plate.