At Craven Arms the satisfaction of this desire did not seem easy, for others were before him in the Refreshment Room and every moment his chance of meeting Lesswardine people increased. He took a flask of brandy from the counter and paid for it without waiting for the change. The local train stood humbly in the siding. He chose a carriage already full of Radnor farmers whom he did not know. He drank down the whole of his flask of brandy, and then fell into a kind of doze lulled by the sing-song voices of his companions. The train twisted along the valley in the dark, pulling up with a jolt at every upland station. At Llandwlas he turned out in a hurry and handed his ticket to a new porter, who stood at the gate in the dusk swinging a lantern. Men were shouting, driving bullocks into a pen. A trap was waiting with the lamps already lit. He avoided their light, but guessed by the colour of the horse and the erect figure of the driver that Marion was waiting for Mr Prosser. A year before he might have dared to ask for a lift to Chapel Green. God, how strange, how hauntingly strange the country smelt! An hour later he staggered into the bar at the Buffalo. Mrs Malpas, a withered, pathetic figure, half the size of the woman whom he remembered, gave a cry and ran to meet him. ‘My son, my son!’ He kissed her, laughing heavily, blowing gusts of brandy into her eyes. She would not think of the spirit in his breath. Her hands caressed his face. She turned him to the light to see if he were changed. ‘Oh, George, you’re that thin! They haven’t fed you proper.’ He freed himself from her. ‘How’s dad?’ he asked. ‘The same as ever, George.’ ‘Poor old devil!’ he said. She drew him into the bar-parlour where the old man was sitting. ‘It’s George, my dear,’ she cried excitedly. ‘It’s our George!’ George slapped his father on the back: ‘Don’t you know me, dad?’ The old man only mumbled. ‘He’s gone downhill,’ said George. ‘You’ve been with him all the time. You don’t see the change like I do.’ ‘Perhaps,’ she said listlessly. She could not keep her eyes from her son. ‘You’re thin, George, so thin!’ ‘Then give us a drop of beer, mother. That’ll help fatten me.’ She could not refuse him. While she was filling the tankard at the counter old Drew and another labourer from the Pentre who had been driving Williams’s bullocks to Llandwlas station came into the bar. ‘My son’s home,’ she told them gaily. ‘And so thin! It’s a scandal. They starve them.’ ‘So I’ve always heard tell, ma’am,’ said Drew, with a wink. ‘Here’s his health.’ ‘Who’s that?’ George asked anxiously. He still found it difficult to resist the impulse of hiding himself. ‘I didn’t see,’ Mrs Malpas lied. She gave George his beer, and he settled down to it. The two labourers spoke spasmodically in the bar. ‘Well, mother,’ he said at last. ‘Tell us how things have been going on.’