The only force that tended to drag him out of this centripetal existence was Susie. Whatever her father might think of Abner, and however little he might come to the Pound House, she had no intention of giving up a man to whom she had taken such a passionate fancy. Of all those with whom she came in contact in Mainstone, Abner had pleased her best, being more completely her opposite than any of the others. His fairness, his strength, and a certain innocence in his composition, had made her choose him for her own, and even though he found the relation exacting and occasionally inconvenient, Abner was still under the spell of her physical attraction. Indeed there seemed to be no fear of this being exhausted, for their meetings were necessarily rarer and therefore more enthralling. In the regularity of his new life at Wolfpits lurked the obvious disadvantage that Abner’s visits to Susie became conspicuous. Mary knew better than to question him on his movements—pride, as well as the tact which she had learned in her experience of George forbade her to do so—but when Abner returned late at night from these assignations she would look at him queerly, and a silence and restraint out of which she could not school herself, made it evident that she resented the mystery. He wished, indeed, that she would ask him where he had been, for then he would have been able to put her off with some deliberate lie which she could believe or reject as she pleased. Anything, he felt, was better than this uncomfortable chill, this shy curiosity of gaze, this silence. It was a condition of affairs that he could not stand and made him anxious, beyond all considerations of prudence, to blurt out his secret—if secret it were—and dissolve the grudging air of mystery with which she received him. One night when he had come home late and could stand her silence no longer, he said suddenly:— ‘Where d’you reckon I’ve been to-night?’ ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to know.’ He laughed, and she made a slight gesture of annoyance. ‘I never met a woman yet who didn’t want to know where a man had been,’ he said. She turned her back on him. ‘Will you lock the door and put out the lamp?’ she said coldly. ‘I’ve been to the Pound House,’ he volunteered, watching her all the time. ‘I should have thought you’d had enough of the Pound House,’ she was tempted to reply bitterly. ‘To see Susie Hind . . .’ he continued. ‘Yes?’ ‘So now you know, missus.’ He wished, perversely, that she would turn on him and tell him what she thought of him. It would have cleared the air. Instead of this she spoke calmly and almost scornfully. ‘Why did you want to tell me this?’ ‘Because a woman’s always itching to know.’ ‘Do you think I didn’t know it already?’ Then she repeated her first words: ‘Please lock the door and put the lamp out,’ and left him.