To which Endellion and Jo Percy Jeyne, to remain strictly in character, ought to have responded with: “Three cheers fur t’squoire!” and danced off left and right, to the ivied inn. Reality, however, prompted them to remain, and separately and argumentatively point out that five shillings was not enough pay for a full morning’s heavy work.... “I’m enjoying this,” Doug remarked, sitting on a packing-case and biting at a cold pasty Mrs. Endellion had brought him. “Aren’t you, Teddy?” “No. Not a bit. I feel like somebody in _Funny Chips_.... Presently you’ll try and hang a picture up, and hit your thumb.” “Why, my dear old kid, I once chopped half a finger off, rigging up a store-hut in a blizzard!” Doug laughed boisterously at the recollection. “I’m sure you did.... I’ve got a sort of creepy suspicion that the Abbotts are going to turn up at Parc Gooth for the night.” “What if they do? Abbott’s a plausible old rogue--simply dripping with humbug. I like him awfully.” “Do you think he had a right to sell his lease to Wenn? Or ought we to have let the Allingham-Joneses look over the place?--but then there was Miss Gregson’s telegram....” Ursula’s eyes brooded in deep shadow. “And Wright said.... Oh, I hate it all!” “Nothing to do with us. Why should you hate it? Women----” “Doug, a woman is _never_ just women----” “----always get cross, moving,” finished Doug, who, never cross or snappish or irritable himself, presented a surface like the wrong sort of matchbox on which these special qualities would not effectively strike. “Come on, Teddy, be a sport, and help me with my cabin,” he concluded, at his last mouthful of pasty. He leaped to his feet, and jumped over an oak chest and part of a dresser, which happened to be blocking his way. By tea-time, his cabin was in beautiful order and ready for occupation. “Do you think we might spare a few minutes now for the other rooms?” Ursula suggested petulantly. But Doug was occupied in lining the drawers of his desk with paper; he announced, absently, that the job would take him some time, and after that, of course, he must give his tools a rub up before stowing them away in the oak chest which he was going to bring down from their bedroom after all.... “Yes,” said Ursula. “I’m going home.” He nodded, absorbed, breathing very hard; his hair was tousled and his bare knees dirty and bruised. Ursula told Mrs. Endellion to rouse him in a couple of hours, to lock up; and went. [XI]