“Oh no, but still”--vaguely--“one must be careful. Poor Frankie--he had one of my sweetest cats, and it came back to me after the tragedy, and I save it an extra saucer of chicken broth whenever I can, because it has seemed so queer ever since.... They know, you see, better than we do, often. Frankie Davis had a wonderful marble staircase,” she rumbled on, “and he had a gang of workmen all the way down from London to move it four times and set it up in different parts of the house, to see where it looked best. And then he went bankrupt and was sold up.... So many of them do down here. Well, it was all very exciting and we mustn’t think about it. Oh, good day, Mr. Wenn”--Mrs. Fawcett scurried into her cat-temple, which was next door to Wright’s shop. “I been digging you a cess-pit, Mr. Barrison,” said Wenn. Doug thanked him. “An’ your pump wasn’t workin’,” he continued, with a touch of grievance in his voice--for obviously since the lease was signed, Doug was now responsible for the pump; “so I had to send my son--Henry, the middle one--down your well to find out where the stoppage was. More’n fifty foot deep it was ... lucky thing Henry went down, too, because if I’d hired a man to put on a dangerous job like that, I’d have had to pay good money to insure his life. But I won’t charge ee more’n I can help, Mr. Barrison. I only want to make you comfortable in the place.” Doug thanked him again, and Ursula amused herself by raising serious childish eyes to meet Wenn’s squarely, with the question: “They say you’re a hard man, Mr. Wenn? Is it true?” It was a trick which she had discovered, to disconcert him completely. “I’d like to know them as say it, Mrs. Barrison.” “_I_ believe in you absolutely, Mr. Wenn. I _know_ you wouldn’t cheat us” ... she wondered whether she dare slip a trustful little hand into his palm. [VIII] IT became apparent during the last three or four weeks of the Barrisons’ tenancy at Parc Gooth, that all its various landlords and sub-landlords were pulling cross-strings at the question of its future. The Abbotts jingled up to the back door, late one evening, and suavely begged for a night’s shelter, as they had business to transact at dawn. Ursula, from her bedroom window, watched them untying from the burdened harness their usual paraphernalia of sacks and parcels, bottles and cans and blankets; Mr. Abbott was a large goblin outline in the sinister yellow flicker of their lantern; she heard and hated Mrs. Abbott’s thin rustling laugh, in reply to some pleasantry of Doug, genial and commonplace in a rough, brown dressing-gown--the type of dressing-gown that proclaimed its owner had no use for effeminate men.