She stopped. "Ruth," she said in her staccato voice, "I envy you." The young mother experienced a swift revulsion of feeling. A profound sympathy stirred her for this ungainly fellow-creature, the slave of circumstances, for whom the door of what Ruth now knew to be Eternity was little likely ever to open, unless forced. Her instinct told her truly that she could best succour the other in her distress by herself seeking aid. "See, I got the chance to marry, Miss," she began with beautiful awkwardness. "I don't rightly knaw what to be at." The other's eyes became shrewd and critical. "D'you like the man?" she asked harshly. "We fits in pretty fair like," Ruth made answer without enthusiasm. "Is he fond of the child?" continued the inquisitor. "O, aye. He fairly dotes on her." "I should take the chance," said the other with a gasp. "You've got the child.... That's the thing that matters.... You must put the child first.... Nothing else counts.... She'll be the better for a father." Next Saturday Ernie strolled across the Brooks, as his custom on that evening was, to meet Ruth on her return from milking. Her course never varied. She milked at the Barton, and carried the milk to the Dower-house. There she emptied her cans and filled them again with water which she carried home to Frogs' Hall to serve the uses of the cottage. Ernie wandered across Parson's Tye, with the long green-backed clergy-house showing its thatch and black and white timber work above the hedge of _arbor vitae_, and out on to the main road at the sea-ward end of the village. Here the Dower-house lay on the left of the road behind a wall. A solid building, comfortable and warm, with russet roof and dormer-windows under a dark sycamore, it had changed little maybe since the great days of old when Aldwoldston on the Ruther, with its tannery, its brewery, its river traffic, and procession of pilgrims passing through from Sea-foord to Michelham Priory, had challenged the supremacy of Lewes on the Ouse, and been something of a city when Beachbourne was still but a tiny hamlet on the hill between the sheep-runs of Beau-nez and the snipe-haunted Levels. Ernie walked soberly along the dry moat that separated the garden-wall from the road. In the middle of the wall was a gate of open ironwork, wrought from Sussex ore, smelted by a Hammer Pond on Ashdown Ridge, and dating from the days when Heathfield was the centre of England's Black Country. The gate, high and narrow, made an eye in the wall with a heavy brow of ivy overhanging it. Ernie crossed the little bridge that spanned the moat between box-hedges, and half-hidden under a lilac against the ivy-covered wall, he peered through the open-work of the gate. From his feet a long grass-path ran up between rank herbaceous borders to the house, ambushed by trees.