“It’s too late, now, for the rest of the Tram-Party, and there’s all that food hurrying to meet them! Miss Lancaster, please come and help to eat it.” “The boy, too,” Hamer added. He often called Lancaster “the boy,” with a quaint, protective accent. “We’ll catch it from Mother if you don’t lend a hand, giving her all that trouble for nothing. Don’t you hark to Dandy Anne--the Tram-Party’s only her nonsense. She wanted to give one or two down-in-the-mouth folk a bit of a feed, but they’ll have to have their particular wire-in another night. You’ll come, won’t you now? We’ll send you back in the car.” Lancaster hesitated, his business-conscience pricking, but his aunt’s declaration that she could not remember whether she had ordered tinned sardines, or tongue, or both, or neither, for their evening meal, did not tend to waken his homing instinct, and he found himself following up the Lane, swinging the lantern over Dandy’s path. It was black, as Harriet had prophesied. In the shifting light the hedges looked huge and dense, climbing to where their sombre tops scarred the fainter dark of the starless heaven, and every curve and turn loomed a barrier impenetrable as the Sleeping Beauty’s Forest. The dream-traps yawned emptily, with witless mouths and vacant eyes. “Will Harriet really stand, do you think?” Dandy asked, keeping with difficulty in the middle of the narrow road, so subtly were track and hedge blended by the Northern night. “It was only a joke, wasn’t it?” “Well, it started as a joke, of course, but I shouldn’t wonder if it didn’t end there. It would be an innovation, just here, but there must always be pioneers, and the lot may have fallen to Harriet. She’s young, but she’s a better man than Thorne, not only in position, but in business and brain. I shouldn’t be surprised if she does have a shot at it. You see, her grandfather’s name still carries weight, and in this county half of us run our reputations on those of our forbears.” “That’s true enough!” Dandy laughed. “Why, only the other day, when we were going over Bluecaster, I heard you say to the housekeeper: ‘Tell me who her mother was, and I’ll know what she is!’ It all comes back to the same thing.” “There’s a lot of reason in it, though, don’t you think? You’ll hear the very man who breeds prize-dogs and specialises in orchids insist that all human beings are equal. He’ll sniff at a cross-bred mongrel and sneer at a dandelion, but he’ll tell you straight that he himself is as good as the bluest blood and the finest stock, though he may be sprung from a collier’s cot or twenty nameless mixed strains. ’Tisn’t common sense, to my thinking! There is no good or evil done, (fine thoughts put into shape or base ones grown secretly,) but blossoms again somehow in later lives. We’ve got to fight our own way, but there’s both help and binding from those gone before.” “But you--surely you stand alone?”