For a little he sat on by the hearth, his shirt open at the neck to the agreeable warmth of the fire, his eyes on the leaping blue and purple flames. It had been a ’borrowed’ day, it had been full of happy anticipation, of planning no longer vague. To-morrow would be even better for, with its dawning, the countryside would gather to Sabina’s funeral and all must recognize him as owner of the place. His heart sang a wild measure of triumph. He was no longer a man in the forties, moving with unimpaired strength yet with a growing stiffness, but one who had renewed his youth. That day had been the beginning. He was dreaming great dreams, passionate hot dreams, the dreams of a man with immense capacities for emotion. Mrs. Bate, shutting up for the night, broke in at long last on a vision of himself teaching a little son—his son and Gray’s—to ride the black stallion; and, getting up, he stretched himself with a laugh, a laugh the old woman thought indecorous. "You’m for overstairs? Well, so be I." "Do I rake out the ashes, maister?" she asked timidly. "Oh, leave’n be." He had no more use for petty economies than he had for petty spite. The day of small things was at an end. To Mrs. Tom the revelation of the previous night had been as the rolling away of a mist from the face of a landscape already dimly familiar. Its horrific nature had banished sleep and darkened a natural grief but had not startled her by its unexpectedness. Subconsciously she had expected something of the sort to happen. She did not dwell on Sabina’s stubborn withholding of the land, on her failure to understand the more emotional more desperate nature of her husband. She accepted it as a fact. Sabina had been like a person riding out to sea, who had believed fondly that she was only fording a river and, with patience and management, must presently find her horse’s hoofs on the shingle of the opposite bank. Tragedy had been the outcome and this Mrs. Tom, with her sure instinct for life, had known would come to pass. Not even the form it had taken had seemed other than natural. A man’s weapons are those to his hand, the things he has handled from his youth up, not something strange and foreign. Byron had poisoned his wife, as he had poisoned old Shep and many another used-up creature. With the means to hand the only wonder was that he had not done it before. He had been married twenty years and every day must to him have been more unhappy and more disappointing than the last. Mrs. Tom was aware of the provocation he had received but accepted it as a cause, not an excuse. Because she saw it with the imagination of the country-woman who, having never been to a theatre is yet able to stage for her own pleasure the dramas being enacted within her reach, saw it with a deadly clarity from faint beginnings to the culmination, her moral sense was not the less outraged. Her attitude towards animals used for food had not affected