He laid down the papers. Could such things be actualities? This must be the copy of some old record he had got hold of. But no; he turned back to the first page and found the date of the previous year. It appalled him to think that since such things had happened to his aunt, they were also liable to happen to him. What would he do with a panage hog, supposing one were driven up to the front door? Still less would he know what to do if one of those farmers he had seen at the funeral were to say to him, “I hold of you, the Lord.” Then he remembered that he had not found the people in the village alarming. He remembered a conversation he had had the day before, with a man and his wife, as he leaned over the gate that led into their little garden. On either side of the tiled path running up to the cottage door were broad beds filled with a jumble of flowers—pansies, lupins, tulips, honesty, sweet-rocket, and bright fragile poppies. “Lovely show of flowers you have there,” he had said tentatively to a woman in an apron, who stood inside the gate knitting. “It’s like that all the summer,” she replied, “my husband’s very proud of his garden, he is. But we’re under notice to quit.” She spoke with an unfamiliar broad accent and a burr, that had prompted Chase to say, “You’re not from these parts?” “No, sir, I’m from Sussex. It’s not a wonderful great matter of distance. I’m wanting my man to come back with me, and settle near my old home, but he says he was born in Kent and in Kent he’ll die.” “That’s right,” approved the man who had come up. “I don’t hold with folk leaving their own county. It’s like sheep—take sheep away from their own parts, and they don’t do near so well. Oxfordshire don’t do on Romney Marsh, and Romney Marsh don’t do in Oxfordshire.” He was ramming tobacco into his pipe, but broke off to pull a seedling of groundsel out from among his pinks. He crushed it together and put it carefully into his pocket. “I made this garden,” he resumed, “carried the mould home on my back evening after evening, and sent the kids out with bodges for road-scrapings, till you couldn’t beat my soil, sir, not in this village, nor my flowers either. But I’m under notice, and sooner than let them pass to a stranger I’ll put my bagginhook through the roots of every plant amongst them,” he said, and spat. “Twenty-five years we’ve lived in this cottage, and brought up ten children,” said the woman. “The cottage is to come down, and make room for a building site, so Mr. Nutley told us,” the man continued. “We’d papered and whitewashed it ourselves,” said the woman. “I laid them tiles, sir, me and my eldest boy,” said the man, pointing with the stem of his pipe down at the path; “a rare job it was. There wasn’t no garden, not when I came here.” “Twenty-five years ago,” said the woman. They both stared mournfully at Chase.