She seemed loath to leave Mary to herself, and even proposed that she should sleep with her, nominally for the sake of warmth, until the strain of George’s trial should be over, an offer that Mary found it difficult to refuse with grace. When she left them she took the younger woman to her breast and kissed her tenderly. Abner opened the door for her, and when he returned he saw that Mary’s eyes were bright with tears. He felt that he himself must struggle to add some words of reassurance, but before he could do so she had said good-night and vanished. Next morning he rose early. He had lit the fire and made the kettle boil before she was astir. When she heard his feet in the kitchen she hurried to come down and thank him. ‘You needn’t have done that,’ she said. ‘That’s nowt,’ he replied bluntly. ‘We’ve got to get on the road early.’ After breakfast she deposited the children, as had been arranged, with Mrs Mamble. Morgan, who scarcely ever left his mother’s side, resented this. ‘Where are you going, mam?’ he cried. ‘Only to Lesswardine with Abner here.’ ‘You’re not going for good, mam? You’re coming back again?’ ‘Don’t be a silly boy, Morgan. Of course I’m coming back.’ ‘When, mam?’ ‘This afternoon.’ A new anxiety seized him. ‘What’s for dinner, mam?’ he said. ‘A nice brown egg, my love, what Mr Drew brought you,’ said Mrs Mamble, coming to the rescue. ‘You come along now, and you shall have dear Robert’s watch to play with.’ To the last temptation Morgan succumbed. This watch was the principal curiosity of Mrs Mamble’s bedroom. It hung there in the smell of rotting wood, a silver monster, like a toy warming-pan, suspended in a celluloid case above the old woman’s bed. Mrs Mamble whipped them away, and Abner set out with Mary. Snow still covered the ground, but by this time, in lane and road, the trampled ways were clear and the bordering drifts marked with the treading of birds, squirrels, and other woodland creatures. Abner was so unused to walking with a woman that he set a pace that Mary could not equal. Breathless, she begged him to walk more slowly. The exertion and the cold air flushed her cheeks and reddened her lips to the hue of holly and spindle-berries in the hedge. Her body glowed, and her hair was bright as the fronds of bracken in the sun. In spite of their tragic mission her lips smiled. No spiritual anxiety could check the exhilaration of the blood that this crisp winter morning gave her walking under the open sky. But when they drew near to Lesswardine the houses closed in on them like the walls of a prison; the fine snow was swept and sullied, the light faded from the sky.