In this way the scandal of the Redlake adventure began to be whispered in that most exclusive circle of which the sewing-party at the vicarage was the centre. In this quarter, indeed, Mary had been already judged and damned as a woman who preferred a life of open sin to the privilege of attending to the blameless, physical needs of the Rev. Cyril Malpas. The new intelligence did no more than supply a sorrowful confirmation of what was already suspected. ‘It’s those two sweet children I’m thinking of,’ said the vicar’s wife. ‘Imagine the awful effects of surroundings of that kind in later life!’ The vicar only shook his head. After all, Wolfpits was so very nearly in his neighbour’s parish as to make him scarcely responsible. It came as a great relief to Abner to find that Gladys was none the worse for her journey in his arms. In the morning they pulled round the long kitchen settle into the sun, and in the evening he carried this out of doors so that the child might enjoy the mellow light with the others. She took a few days to get over the original shock of the accident, but after that she settled down into a placid convalescence, fully aware of her importance and treating, not only Mary and Mrs Mamble, but Abner and Mick Connor, as her slaves. Morgan was vaguely jealous of the attention that they paid her. ‘But _I_ slep’ with Abner,’ he said, ‘and Gladys an’t, has her, mam?’ Mary smiled at him. Now that she knew that Gladys’s injury was not so severe as they had imagined she could afford to smile, sitting there in the summer evening with her friends about her. It was so quiet at Wolfpits. Not even the birds were singing. She sat there and heard the trout rising and plopping in the pool beneath the bridge, a hundred yards away, and then the murmurous wings of a humming-bird-hawk moth, hovering in a nebula of bronze, swooping to plunge its curled trumpet into the cups of flowers. Then beetles droned above them and bats zig-zagged with rapid wings. She told Abner that it was time for him to take the settle into the house. While he did so she held Gladys in her lap and watched the man’s big shoulders as he moved almost without effort under the weight of the settle. It reminded her of another memory of him that she knew she would never forget: a picture of trailing mists and loneliness, and a man walking before her with a child in his arms. In this state of happiness and innocence neither of them suspected any mischief of tongues. It is true that Abner had found the presence of Badger at the Pentre on the night of the fair a little sinister at first, but the fact that they had chosen to descend into the Wolfpits valley at the level of the sea-crows’ pool and Williams’s farm was the purest accident, and Mary, who only knew the keeper by name, and had never seen him outside a court of law, thought nothing of it, while Mr Williams of the Pentre never entered into their calculations as a source of evil.