Five minutes later Mr Prosser came into the yard with his ploughman Harris. The farmer was a tall, fair man, with golden whiskers and a moustache that almost hid the weakness of his mouth. ‘H’m, you’re the young man, are you?’ he said, looking Abner up and down with more curiosity than he could have been expected to show for a casual labourer. ‘What is it you want? Eh?’ Abner repeated his request, and the farmer, with a little less than the usual surliness of his kind, said: ‘Well, yes, I dare say we can do with you so long as you’re not afraid of work. But it’s a short job, I warn you!’ The younger girl, who had been listening dreamily to their conversation, turned and uttered a shrill cry. ‘Dad! Dad!’ she said, ‘I’m afraid I’ve drowned one of them!’ She ran forward with an inanimate piece of yellow fluff in her hand. ‘Oh, what a shame!’ ‘That’s like you, Ethel,’ the father grumbled. ‘Take it in to Marion.’ But by this time the elder sister had appeared and was holding the duckling to her breast as though she would have liked to nurse it back to life. Ethel stood watching her with tears in her eyes. ‘You’ll never make a farmer’s wife, Ethel,’ said Mr Prosser, teasing her. ‘Come here! Give us a kiss!’ He held the child’s face in his hands and kissed her noisily. Marion had carried the duckling into the house. He turned to Abner. ‘Day after to-morrow,’ he said. ‘Come up early . . . about five o’clock.’ The Twenty-First Chapter SINCE the time of her Ludlow schooldays and her friendship with Mary Condover, Marion Prosser’s horizon had widened to an extent that might easily have explained the distance which now separated them. From Ludlow she had been sent on to finish her education at a Cheltenham college; for her mother had social ambitions and knew that the nearest way to the homes of her superiors lay through the schools that their daughters frequented. She always taught Marion to speak of her father as a ‘gentleman-farmer,’ a description which Mr Prosser accepted under more protest than he usually offered to anything that his wife dictated. For all that, he was proud of the fact that The Dyke had belonged to his family for six generations, and when he walked round his fields on a Sunday evening and surveyed their richness from the crumbled earthwork of Offa’s Dyke, which gave the farm its name, could even be sentimental on the subject.