Nor had she ever attempted to make intimate friends of any of the people in the district. They would have accepted her all right, for she was both amusing and clever, as well as a hard worker. But right from the first she had either rejected her neighbours’ overtures, or accepted them against her will, and gradually they had come to acknowledge the situation, and to realise that they could get no further. He had spoken to her quite early upon the subject, seeing where she was drifting, but he had not succeeded in changing her mind. “What’s to do you won’t take tea with Mrs. Grisedale?” he had enquired one afternoon, as he came in. “I met her just now when I was down at station after some weed-killer as hasn’t turned up, and she was right grieved about it. They’re having a few friends in, she says, for that christening-party of theirs, and she’s keen for you to be there.” “I just didn’t fancy it, that’s all,” Mattie had said, although taking care not to meet his eye. “It’s a bit of a trial, I always think, talking to folks as you don’t know.” “Well, that’s easy mended, isn’t it, and the sooner you start in at it the better? Mrs. Grisedale, for one, ’ll not take you long. She seems a decent little soul.” “Oh, ay, she’ll do.” “There’s Mrs. Ellwood an’ all,--she’s asked you time and again. She told me she’d never taken to anybody as she’s taken to you.” “And she’ll do, too.” “Well, then, what’s to do you can’t make friends with the pair of them?” Kirkby had blundered on. “You couldn’t have a nicer couple of folks than them two, and you’ll be wanting somebody.” But he had had to probe for some time before she would give him the explanation. “It’s like this,” she had said at last, half-ashamed, as he could see, and yet determined upon her line of action. “It just isn’t worth while. Making friends takes a deal of time and a deal of patience, and once you’ve got ’em made, it takes a deal of getting over if you’ve got to leave them. Well, it isn’t worth it. I’m set on getting away from this spot, as you don’t need telling, and if I take up with any of the folk, it’ll all be wasted.” “Nay, what, friendship and such-like is never wasted, surely!” he had affirmed stoutly. “I don’t hold with gardeners getting too thick with folks, nor their wives, neither. There’s some as’ll seek you out just for the sake of what’s behind you. But it isn’t good, all the same, to be always by yourself, and a few nice friends’d likely help you to settle down.” But, unfortunately for his cause, he had hit on the one plea that was least likely to weigh with her. “Nay, but that’s just what I don’t want to do,” she had said, looking past him, with the effect, which he was later to know so well, of seeing beyond him into great distances. “I don’t know how to put it, but it would be wrong for me, would that. It’d be losing something as is right down necessary to me. If making friends with folks is going to mean settling down, then I’m best without it.”