Sometimes, too, he would lean on the fence watching old Drew at work in his garden. The old labourer was as hardy as the knotted oak that he resembled. His day’s work began before dawn: he had more than three miles to walk to the farm on which he was employed, but when he returned in the evening after trudging the fields all day, he could never rest, but must be putting his strip of garden in order so intently that he scarcely had time to answer Abner’s questions, staring up at him with those patient, over-burdened eyes. His wages, which were regulated by his age rather than his capacity for labour, were only twelve shillings a week, so that his garden produce was really essential to his life. When he had finished his gardening, or when the light failed, he would retire to his kitchen and drink a crude, sweet spirit that he distilled from turnips. Sometimes at night they would hear him singing to himself the innumerable obscene verses of Devonshire folk-songs. Then, when he could sing no longer, he would drag his twisted limbs upstairs and sleep like a log in the certainty of waking before dawn to set out on his labours again. His life indeed had been so solitary that he distrusted any intrusion, and Abner had known him and spoken with him for many weeks before he felt that his presence was welcome. The other tenant of Wolfpits he rarely saw, though her five years in the old house had made her a confidante of Mary, and indeed her principal refuge in domestic emergencies. Sometimes when he came home at night he would find her talking to Mary in the kitchen, but at the sight of him she scuttled away so that he saw no more of her than one sees of a rabbit’s vanishing tail. Mary Malpas did not evade him in this primitive fashion and yet, even when he had been living at Wolfpits for more than a month, he felt that he really knew her no better than the fugitive Mrs Mamble. He could find no parallel to her in the history of his dealings with Alice at Mawne. The thing for which Alice had been mostly concerned was her dignity as mistress of John Fellows’s house, and this she had been active to assert. Mary Malpas, on the other hand, had no need to stand upon her dignity. It was instinct in the refinement of her speech and even more in her silence. The fact that her father had been a swindler and a suicide could never rob her of it. Abner fancied for a time that the awkwardness between them was caused by the way in which he had been suddenly thrust upon her household. He felt that he might stand to her as a symbol of a new slight inflicted on her by her husband. Otherwise why should she deny him the least suspicion of human contact? He even made an awkward attempt to settle the matter by asking her if she would not be better pleased if he tried to find another lodging. ‘If I’m in the way like,’ he told her, ‘just you say so, and I’ll be off.’