He walked back irritably into the village. An old man was putting out the oil lamps that gave a feeble light to the street. What was he, Abner, doing without a woman, when the village was full of them? He looked up at the front room of the inn where Mary and the children were sleeping. It filled him with an unreasoning annoyance to think of her sleeping calmly there. She was treating him ridiculously, without confidence. Why hadn’t she come down into the room for supper as soon as she had put the children to sleep? Just because the landlady had shocked her by suggesting that they should sleep together, he supposed, and, by God, it might have put some sense into her if they had done so. He laughed. He hadn’t thought of Mary in that light before; but in this curious state to which the liquor, the moonlight, and that light voice heard in the darkness had excited him, he felt that he had been a fool not to make love to Mary. If once he had treated her that way and she had accepted him, there would be an end of her airs and graces. George . . .? Well, George’s own life didn’t exact a high degree of fidelity from his wife. So, like a hungry animal, Abner prowled beneath the inn windows. The panes of that which belonged to Mary’s bedroom shone blankly in the moon through twigs of white jessamine. In the bar, Mr Prowse, now very drunk, was declaiming staccato judgments on the value of basic slag. Abner would have joined them and got drunk if he had any money to spend, but the small sum that he had saved for the occasion would do no more than pay for their lodging and their return fares to Llandwlas. The moonlight seemed to cool the air. Even the smell of jessamine grew fainter in the cold. It was no good standing there any longer, and so he found a sleeping place on some straw in the loft above the stable, and settled down as well as he could, listening to the steady grinding of the horses’ jaws and the snatching noise that they made as they pulled out hay from the racks above their mangers.