“Mus’ Sumption wur more blacksmith nor he wur minister,” they said when any local enthusiasm for him prevailed; and it was true that in his loneliness and anxiety he would often find comfort in the forge at Sunday Street, where he could sit and watch Bourner the smith swing his hammer, or even sometimes himself, with coat thrown off and shirt-sleeves rolled back over arms long and hairy as a gorilla’s, smite the hot iron or scrape the patient hoof, while his face grew red as copper in the firelight and the sweat ran over it and his shaggy chest. To-night, when Jerry had wounded him afresh, he turned to his unfailing refuge. His pain was not the mere dread of death or maiming of the lad—it was something more sinister, more intangible. “The army is not for the gipsy woman’s son.” He feared for Jerry in that organised system of rank and order and command. He would have preferred him in the workshop even if the relative danger of the two places had been reversed. Jerry was less likely to be smashed by a German shell than by the system in which he had enrolled himself. He would break his head against its discipline, hang himself in its rules.... His dread for Jerry under martial law was the dread his Meridian’s ancestors would have felt for her under a roof. It was a fear based more on instinct than on reason, therefore all the more bruising to the instinctive passion of fatherhood. It was well that he had this refuge of iron and anvil, of hammer and hoof, this small comforting similitude of the day which should burn as an oven.... Bourner the smith did not talk to him much. He made a few technical remarks, and winked at his mate when Mr. Sumption boasted of Jerry’s valour in joining the army. But gradually the tired, careworn look on the minister’s face died away, his eyes ceased to smoulder and roll; in the thick stuffy atmosphere, strong with the smell of hoofs and the ammoniacal smell of hide and horses, grey with smoke and noisy with the roar of flames and the ring of iron, he was going back in peace to his father’s house, to the smithy at the throws by Bethersden, before the burdens of divine and human love had come down upon him. 4 After his companion had left him, Tom Beatup walked quickly down the lane, past the Horselunges and the Rifle Volunteer, to where Worge gate hung crooked across Worge drive, paintless and smeared with dew. Here he stopped a minute, and looked at the huddle of the farm. It was one black shape against the yellow of the sky, and the cones of its oasts and the spires of its poplars seemed part of its block, so that it looked grotesque and horned. He hesitated, rubbed his hand along the top of the gate and licked the dew off his fingers, then turned and walked eastward.