He didn’t know where to go; but taking his father’s example he wandered down to the Royal Oak, where he sat drinking pint after pint with one of his football friends and a couple of women. At closing time the whole party were turned out together and walked down into Halesby. It was nearly daybreak when he returned to Hackett’s Cottages, still the worse for liquor, and blundered upstairs to bed. He slept so heavily that he did not hear the Mawne bull in the morning. At ten o’clock a feeling that some one was in the room aroused him. He opened his eyes to a blinding light and saw that Alice had placed a cup of hot tea at his bedside. He drank it so eagerly that he scalded his mouth. The Fifth Chapter THIS sudden outburst was sufficiently violent to satisfy Abner that for the present he could do without liquor or women. It wasn’t very difficult to forget Susan, for she had really been more trouble than she was worth. The affair would never have begun but for her provocation, and since she hadn’t the pluck to go through with it, Abner satisfied himself by exaggerating her insipidity in his own mind. After the first sting of malice with which she had sent him off on the drink, Alice showed her repentance, first symbolised by the waiting cup of tea, in a hundred attentions and kindnesses. He never told her about his affair with Susan, but she appeared to understand more or less what had happened and even to sympathise with him in his violent methods of getting over it. She made him so comfortable at Hackett’s Cottages that there was no more talk of his finding other lodgings. In the early days of her married life the responsibilities of the house and its two male inhabitants had been too much for her inexperience, and the coming of the baby in the first year had made her abandon all attempts to keep pace with domestic demands. In the second year she regained her strength and a great deal of the physical charm that had originally attracted John Fellows. The baby, a normal, healthy child, had also prospered, and now that he was weaned slept away most of the day on his mother’s bed upstairs or in his cradle in the kitchen. Nothing marred the smoothness of domestic life at Number Eleven but the uncertainty of John Fellows’s temper and his periodical bouts of drinking; and even in these emergencies Alice’s increasing knowledge of life and her absorption in the care of Abner and her baby sustained her.