Abner himself was sensible of the change in her attitude toward him. During the time of his work at the Pentre, he became aware of it. Little by little, for she was far too cautious to make the change a sudden one, she was demolishing the barrier that she had built so carefully between them, and he, reluctantly, had accepted. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, they were nearing once more the point which they had reached in a moment of stress and abandonment on the night of the white mist six months before, the moment when he had seen her transfigured, or rather revealed, as the one woman in the world whom he wanted, body and soul. In all those hard days not a single chilling word passed her lips, not a single intolerable silence drove him away from her. Her kindness made her beautiful, but the nearness of her beauty frightened him and he withdrew himself, having once cruelly burnt his fingers at that flame. He was happy, but could not trust his happiness, not because any scruples of honour pricked him, but because he feared a new rebuff. Even though he dared not believe in her submission he could not escape the influence of her tenderness. The lean days were the best he had ever known at Wolfpits: even if he had had money to spend he would not have gone elsewhere, and every moment that brought him nearer to the inevitable parting on which he had decided, made the idea of it more painful and more difficult. It now seemed to him monstrously unreasonable that when such complete happiness was in his grasp he should wilfully renounce it. And yet, what else could he do? A sense of the futility of her kindness made him shrink from it. She saw what was happening, knew that she deserved it, and in order that she might justify herself she now tried to play on his affection for the children, to create an atmosphere of interdependence among the four of them, to bind him closer to her with a web of many strands each so slender that he need not be aware of the process. But he felt the light pressure of the net in which he was being entangled; he struggled to free himself. And she saw the convulsions of his struggle and feared to lose him. The thrill of this new, half-hidden conflict held her. On the Saturday night before his last week at the Pentre, he kept back five shillings of his earnings. By working from dawn till sunset each day he had managed to put in many hours of overtime, so that he was able to give her half a sovereign clear. It seemed to him a good opportunity for breaking the news of his plan to her. Sooner or later the word must be spoken. She held the gold coin in her hand and looked at him inquiringly. ‘You’ll be two bob short this week,’ he said, ‘but if any one knows how to manage, you do. After that I reckon things’ll begin to look up a bit.’ She flushed with a sudden pleasure. ‘Abner!’ she cried. ‘You don’t mean to say that Mr Williams is going to keep you on?’