Of a sudden his hunger assailed him, violent, convulsive, and, going over to the tin safe, he rummaged among the cold scraps he found there, devouring greedily the food which lead been set by for the hounds. A bottle of Miss Saidie's raspberry vinegar was hidden in one corner, and he tore the paper label from the cork and drank like a man who perishes from thirst. His energy, which had evaporated from fatigue and hunger, surged back in spasms of anger, and as he turned away, invigorated, from the safe, he realised as he had never done before the full measure of his rage against Maria. At the moment, had she come in upon him, he felt that he could have struck her in the face. But she did not come, and the slow minutes fretted him in their passage. A flame shot up in the stove, and, catching a knot of resinous pine, burned steadily, licking patiently about the fading embers. The air became charged again with the odour of burned feathers, and he saw that a handful, with the dried blood of the fowl still adhering to them, had been scattered upon the ashes. As he idly noted the colours of red and black, he remembered with bitterness that he had raised game-cocks once when he was a boy at the Hall, and that Maria had smashed a nestful of his eggs in a fit of passion. The incident swelled to enormous proportions in his thoughts, and he determined that he would remind her of it in the interview that was before them. The door into the house creaked suddenly behind him; he wheeled about nervously, and then stood with hanging jaws staring into the face of Fletcher. "So it is you, is it?" said the old man, raising the stick he carried. "So it is you, as I suspected--you darn rascal!" But the power of speech had departed from Will in the presence that he dreaded, and he stood clutching tightly to his harvest hat, and shaking his head as if to deny the obvious fact of his own identity. "I thought it was you," pursued Fletcher, licking his dry lips. "I heard a noise, and I picked up my stick, thinking it was you. I'll have no thieving beggars on my place, I tell you, so the quicker you git off the better. When were you here last, I'd like to know?" "Yesterday," answered Will, speaking the truth from sheer physical inability to frame a lie. "I came to see Maria. She's cheated me--she's cheated me all along." "Then she lied," said Fletcher softly. "Then she lied and I didn't know it." "She's cheated me," insisted Will hoarsely. "It's been all a scheme of hers from the very beginning. She's cheated me about the will, grandpa; I swear she has." "Eh? What's that?" responded the old man, shaking back his heavy eyebrows. "Say your say right now, for in five minutes you go off this place with every hound in the pack yelping at your heels. I'll not have you here--I'll not have you here!" The words ended in a snarl, and a fleck of foam dropped on his gray beard.