She felt a sudden relief. ‘Yes, you’re quite right,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you’re right.’ She spoke as if it were the matter of principle that interested her. Next day he refused Marion’s offer, and she left him in a huff. She was miserable, for she could not overcome the attraction which he had exercised over her from the first, yet was too bashful to declare herself more openly. She tried to tell herself that Abner was only a labouring man and her inferior in station, but she could not pretend that physically he was not her equal, nor deny his influence. She hoped that he would notice the change in her attitude, see that she was avoiding him, and, perhaps, miss her; but he went on with his work as usual and did not seem to care whether she came near him or sent him messages by Ethel or Agnes, the maid, and so, gradually, with a feeling of shame, she was driven back to his company. The days were now drawing in rapidly, and it was after sunset when the cows came to be milked. It had been Marion’s custom to carry the scoured pails to the byre and stand by Abner’s side while he milked. When he drove the cows into the shed he would light a stable lantern and hang it from a nail in the wall before he found his stool and took the pail from her hands. These were the moments when she felt herself nearest to him. Standing in the doorway of the shippon she would watch him as he sat with his fair head pressed to the cows’ flanks and listen to the milk swishing into the pails. It was a moment of most soothing silence. Neither of them spoke, nor was there any other sound but that of the cows snatching hay from the racks above them with their lips and filling the shed with their sweet breath. Marion stood very still in that slow-breathing quietude, and thither, like shadows, came the cats that lived in the lofts and roofs of the granary, shy, half-savage creatures. It was part of Abner’s ritual to set a tin basin of milk frothing-warm on the floor for them, and round this they would walk, five or six of them, with sidelong gait and tails uplifted. Every night at milking-time they came. But if she stirred a muscle they were gone. She watched them, quiet, hallucinated; and when they were gone she stayed on in the silence, while Abner strained the milk into her scalded buckets and passed from stall to stall. One evening she found him troubled. ‘I don’t half like the look of Daisy here,’ he said. Daisy was a red Devon cow, the only one of her breed in Prosser’s herd of white-nosed Herefords. Some weeks before she had calved; but the calf had been feeble and had died, and though they had given her a calf-skin stuffed with straw to lick she had pined, and the milk had failed in quality. Now she stood miserably in her stall with her ears turned back and her sleek coat staring. ‘Why, what’s wrong with her?’ Marion asked.