Gentleman Roberts had drawn up a lease most marvellously in favour of Isaac Wenn and to the disadvantage of Douglas Barrison. He lost his temper every time Doug questioned a clause, and threw his inkpot down and stamped about the floor. Finally, Doug and Wenn both pressed their thumbs solemnly upon a seal and repeated an oath, and the “foreigner” was charged five guineas. “Five guineas was rather a lot to plank down for a simple job like that, surely?” remarked Ursula, as, once more in the jingle, they jolted home along eleven miles of dark and chilly road. “Usual price, Mrs. Barrison.” Wenn was in a rubicund state of good humour, in contrast to the Barrisons’ slight moodiness. “You wouldn’t find Gentleman Roberts’d do a fly. Five guineas is what I pay for a lease whenever I can afford to buy a bit o’ property. Mitch, what price did ee pay for lease when you took Trewoofa?” “Five guineas,” droned the well-trained Joshua Mitch, from where he trudged at the horse’s head. Ursula longed to ask whether he also took a small percentage of the day’s easy gains; or if Wenn and Gentleman Roberts, with many chuckles, divided the five guineas equally, and Mitch backed them up merely because he was a humble minion in their power? But she refrained, because the road was long and chilly and very dark ... and on either side was a ditch. “You’ve got a rare bargain in renting that there cottage o’ mine,” Wenn continued, turning up the collar of his overcoat. “Why, the tenant afore you--one o’ the Endellions, moved away to St. Pol now, he made twelve pounds, two summers back, out o’ growin’ potatoes alone. Mitch, what did William Endellion make out o’ potatoes up tu my cottage, two summers back?” “Twelve pounds,” said Joshua Mitch. The next morning, Wenn appeared suddenly in the doorway of Parc Gooth, his hands full of early cauliflowers which he had brought the Barrisons as a spontaneous gift from his own garden at Polpinnock. Most gifts are made in a spirit of either generosity or remorse; Wenn was not by nature generous. “_Timeo Danaos_....” murmured Ursula. [VII] THE doors of Wright’s General Stores were closed and heavily barred, when the Barrisons went round to him with an account of the sinister cauliflowers; after repeated noisy rappings from Doug’s specially knotted and gnarled blackthorn, a reconnoitering beard was thrust through a flap--“One minute, sir, if you don’t mind,” bars were drawn back, keys turned, and the lower part of the door creaked cautiously open, admitting Ursula and Doug, and was hastily closed again behind them. “It’s my travellers’ day,” explained Mr. Wright, breathing very hard. “You won’t mind waiting a few minutes?”