To tell the truth, Ivy had not meant to offer such a public challenge to a local opinion. She had made up her mind that Seagrim would not appear at all, or in a very subdued condition. However, on Friday she had a letter of the usual loving kind, excusing his absence during the week on the score of extra duty and asking her to meet him at Worge gate next Sunday morning—“with her boy’s fondest love” and a row of kisses. Ivy’s teeth bit deep into her lip as she read this letter. He was still deceiving her, though now, thank the Lord, he was also deceived himself. He did not know his wife had been to see her, and doubtless Mrs. Seagrim had now gone back to “the business”—a corn-chandler’s in Alnwick. Ivy wondered why she had kept her own counsel, but no doubt the “dressed-up hop-pole” knew best how to deal with her man. If she betrayed her plot it might have led to friction between an affectionate husband and wife, and she probably felt that she had “settled” Ivy. The girl’s blood ran thick with humiliation—both the man and the woman had shamed her. Doubtless they loved each other well, though he, with a man’s greediness, had wanted another woman in her absence. He could never have meant to marry Ivy—his intentions must always have been vague or dishonourable. As for the wife, having spent some of the cash left over from her clothes, in running down South to look after him, she had no doubt been satisfied with warning Ivy and coaxing her husband, and had then gone back to her flourishing shop. True that this letter hardly pointed to the success of her tactics, but Ivy knew too much about men to attach great importance to it—Seagrim was just the sort of man who would have a girl wherever he went, and yet always keep the first place in his heart for the woman who had also his name. She, Ivy, was probably only a secondary attachment to fill the place of the other, and no doubt in that other’s absence; he would make every effort to keep her—but she was a stop-gap, an interlude, to him who had been her all, and filled the spare moments of one who had filled her life. She forced herself to bite down on this bitter truth, and swallowed it—and it gave her strength for the course she meant to take. She found Seagrim leaning against Worge gate, sucking the knob of his swagger stick, and gazing at her with shining long-lashed eyes of grey. For a moment the sight of him there, his greeting, the husky tones love put into his voice, his sunburnt, hawk-like strength, all combined to make her falter. But she was made of too solid stuff to forget his callous deception of her, which he still maintained, drawing her arm through his with a few glib lies about extra duty and the sergeant. Contempt for him stabbed her heart and eyes, and for a few moments she could neither look at him nor speak.