From the first sight of him Abner had pleased her. He was eighteen, just a year older than herself. His handsome head, his excellent teeth, his contrasting fairness, the size and strength of his body, all attracted her. She thought she would like to be alone with him and see what would happen. Therefore she began by inviting herself to accompany him on one of his evening excursions with Tiger. Abner resented the proposal, partly because he had never quite shaken off the convention of his boyhood that girls were soft and any dealings with them shameful, and partly because he was jealous of any stranger invading a world that was so particularly his own and so specially guarded from the feminine influence hitherto represented by Alice. But Susan, by her quiet determination, made it impossible for him to refuse. She had always been—after the poultry—her father’s principal pet, and when Abner put her off, she simply declined to believe that he meant it. He grumbled and submitted. He supposed that he was doing a kindness to Mrs Moseley by taking her, and comforted himself with the thought that, after all, Susan wasn’t like other girls: a conclusion at which he arrived without difficulty, seeing that he had known no other girl but Alice. On his side, indeed, the relationship was as natural as it might be. It was Susan who found it rather a failure in the absence of sentimental developments. Abner treated her, she found, very much as if she had been a boy; and though this was the pose with which she had started their acquaintance, she didn’t want it to remain at that. Mrs Moseley’s looking-glass, in which she could see herself when she sat in her favourite place at the foot of the bed in the morning, assured her that she was much nicer to look at now than when she first came to Halesby from the city. She was plumper, her cheeks and lips were more brightly coloured and her eyes clearer. Mr Bagley would have noticed the difference. Abner, apparently, didn’t. She comforted herself with the reflection that he was too rough and rugged to realise her delicacy, that he was only a common labourer and no fit associate for a foreman’s daughter, but when she came to think of it, her social quality should really have made her more attractive to him. She was a very direct young woman. One evening when they went out for their walk down the lane that leads to the woody basin known as Dovehouse Fields they came to a lonely stile at the end of a bridge over a tributary of the Stour, beyond which the red bank was tunnelled by many rabbits. Tiger ran forward eagerly over the bridge and began to sniff at the holes in the bank, and Abner would have followed him if Susan had not barred the way, sitting complacently on the top of the stile. She sat there in the low sunlight that warmed her cheeks, lighted gleams of copper in her hair, and made her brown eyes amber. ‘I want to stay here, Abner,’ she said.