From the group of women about the hearth, a voice cut into the discussion. "She thought," said Mrs. Tom, moved by her secret knowledge to a bitter word, "as she’d maybe live as long as ’er ’usband." Mr. Criddle accepted this contribution with a little bend of the head. "She did. She said as much. She thought if she should predecease Mr. Byron he would, by that time, be too old to start farming on his own account." Byron brushed this aside as irrelevant. He was becoming gradually conscious of meshes about his feet—meshes from which, however, he still thought he could escape. "But," he said and he believed it, "she can’t leave the land to any one else, what’s ’ers is mine." "The law gives women the right to dispose of their property," returned the lawyer patiently. His mind was divided between Byron and the clock. A few minutes more and, if he were not to miss the train, he must start on the drive back. "You don’t mean," Byron was aghast but incredulous, "that the law gives ’er the right to leave the land away from me?" "It does." "The missus could do as she liked with the land?" began the unhappy man and there was such poignant anxiety in his tones that, even Mrs. Tom, angry and embittered, felt a qualm of pity. ’Poor old toad, too, he was taking it hard!’ "Yes!" Sabina had had the power and she had used it, used it simply and without heart-searchings or artifice. The world was turning round with him, but he still had his hands on that which he had taken. In spite of will and lawyer he would hold to it. He felt that nothing could relax his grip, that the land was his from now on until time should make him more intimately a part of it, yet something was slipping from him—slipping—— He looked from face to face along the sides of the table, from Con, heavy and ruminative, to Beulah Sowden, whose glassy eyes stared unresponsive as ever and so to Tom Rosevear. The day was being driven out by the shadow hosts of evening but the faces were still distinct. The unhappy man searched them with the old, desperate, ’Who is on my side, who?’ "What good," said he in an urgent troubling voice, "what good would Wastralls be to Gray—a young maid?" Being farmers all, their prejudices, their outlook, would put them against the will. They could not approve of land being left to a woman. Anything else but not land. Byron thought that with them to back him he might force the lawyer-fellow to see reason. After all, it was the men of the community who made the law and, if these would give it as their opinion that the will was unjust, was unnatural, it might be upset.