“About that new shed for the young stock—that was all. These first autumn storms settin’ in … but I’ll come again, Miss.” His teeth did not chatter much more than the door latch. “I think not,” she answered levelly. “The new shed—m’m. What did my agent write you on the 15th?” “I—fancied p’raps that if I came to see you—ma—man to man like, Miss. But——” His eyes rolled into every corner of the room wide with horror. He half opened the door through which he had entered, but I noticed it shut again—from without and firmly. “He wrote what I told him,” she went on. “You are overstocked already. Dunnett’s Farm never carried more than fifty bullocks—even in Mr. Wright’s time. And _he_ used cake. You’ve sixty-seven and you don’t cake. You’ve broken the lease in that respect. You’re dragging the heart out of the farm.” “I’m—I’m getting some minerals—superphosphates—next week. I’ve as good as ordered a truck-load already. I’ll go down to the station to-morrow about ’em. Then I can come and see you man to man like, Miss, in the daylight…. That gentleman’s not going away, is he?” He almost shrieked. I had only slid the chair a little further back, reaching behind me to tap on the leather of the screen, but he jumped like a rat. “No. Please attend to me, Mr. Turpin.” She turned in her chair and faced him with his back to the door. It was an old and sordid little piece of scheming that she forced from him—his plea for the new cowshed at his landlady’s expense, that he might with the covered manure pay his next year’s rent out of the valuation after, as she made clear, he had bled the enriched pastures to the bone. I could not but admire the intensity of his greed, when I saw him out-facing for its sake whatever terror it was that ran wet on his forehead. I ceased to tap the leather—was, indeed, calculating the cost of the shed—when I felt my relaxed hand taken and turned softly between the soft hands of a child. So at last I had triumphed. In a moment I would turn and acquaint myself with those quick-footed wanderers…. The little brushing kiss fell in the centre of my palm—as a gift on which the fingers were, once, expected to close: as the all faithful half-reproachful signal of a waiting child not used to neglect even when grown-ups were busiest—a fragment of the mute code devised very long ago. Then I knew. And it was as though I had known from the first day when I looked across the lawn at the high window. I heard the door shut. The woman turned to me in silence, and I felt that she knew. What time passed after this I cannot say. I was roused by the fall of a log, and mechanically rose to put it back. Then I returned to my place in the chair very close to the screen. “Now you understand,” she whispered, across the packed shadows. “Yes, I understand—now. Thank you.” “I—I only hear them.” She bowed her head in her hands. “I have no right, you know—no other right. I have neither borne nor lost—neither borne nor lost!”