His first attempts seemed full of promise. At the time when he had set out canvassing before, he had always been received with a kind of negative pessimism that he learned to consider as the normal attitude toward life of the border farmer. Now, he noticed that the farm-people, and particularly the women, listened to his applications with more interest, remembered his name, asked him questions about himself, and even appeared to regard his person with curiosity. He took this as a good sign; but though he was encouraged his hopes came no nearer to realisation. One after another the local farmers or their wives heard his story, had a good look at him, and turned him down. The reason for their interest was not far to seek. In spite of Mr Prosser’s anxiety to keep dark the true cause of Abner’s dismissal and the scandal that it implied, Harris, the ploughman, had not been able to resist the temptation of making public his enemy’s discomfiture, and though nobody dared to whisper to the principal actors in the comedy that they knew what had happened, the whole story of Marion Prosser’s infatuation for her father’s cowman went the rounds of the neighbourhood. At Ludlow market it passed for a good tale against Prosser, who was envied for his possessions, and Marion, whose aloofness had made her unpopular. In the most frequent version of the story Abner had been caught out with Marion in the byre at a time when that astute young woman had arranged for her father to stay the night at Craven Arms for his health’s sake. Marion, it was said, had refused, for the most pressing of reasons, to give her cowman up; but Prosser’s family pride—a well-known quantity—had been so deeply wounded that he had threatened to shoot the fellow on the spot and let his daughter’s name go hang. The men enjoyed the joke against Prosser; the women were agreed that proud creatures such as Marion usually found their own level by some such violent means. The principal question of interest that remained was where Marion would go to hide her shameful condition. In every stratum of local society from that of Lesswardine Court to that of the newly-married Mrs Badger at the Pentre, the incident was discussed; but nobody in the district heard it with more triumph and satisfaction than old Mrs Malpas of the Buffalo. By this time the whole village was so used to her vilifications of Mary that they were scarcely taken seriously, for village opinion, even when it is censorious in expression, is, as a rule, charitable in deed. Now that she found herself armed with a new enormity to reinforce the old, she set herself steadily to the task of making it impossible for Abner to find work. She determined to drive him out of the district, for in this way she knew that Mary and her children must undergo the suffering that they deserved and that Abner’s devotion had spared them.