uced a feeling that there could not
be any real difference between their points of view. Perceiving at last
that if he did not speak they would continue sitting there dumb till it
was time for him to go, Malloring said:

"Look here, Freeland; about my wife and yours and Tryst and the Gaunts,
and all the rest of it! It's a pity, isn't it? This is a small place,
you know. What's your own feeling?"

Tod answered:

"A man has only one life."

Malloring was a little puzzled.

"In this world. I don't follow."

"Live and let live."

A part of Malloring undoubtedly responded to that curt saying, a part of
him as strongly rebelled against it; and which impulse he was going to
follow was not at first patent.

"You see, YOU keep apart," he said at last. "You couldn't say that so
easily if you had, like us, to take up the position in which we find
ourselves."

"Why take it up?"

Malloring frowned. "How would things go on?"

"All right," said Tod.

Malloring got up from the sill. This was 'laisser-faire' with a
vengeance! Such philosophy had always seemed to him to savor dangerously
of anarchism. And yet twenty years' experience as a neighbor had shown
him that Tod was in himself perhaps the most harmless person in
Worcestershire, and held in a curious esteem by most of the people about.
He was puzzled, and sat down again.

"I've never had a chance to talk things over with you," he said. "There
are a good few people, Freeland, who can't behave themselves; we're not
bees, you know!"

He stopped, having an uncomfortable suspicion that his hearer was not
listening.

"First I've heard this year," said Tod.

For all the rudeness of that interruption, Malloring felt a stir of
interest. He himself liked birds. Unfortunately, he could hear nothing
but the general chorus of their songs.

"Thought they'd gone," murmured Tod.

Malloring again got up. "Look here, Freeland," he said, "I wish you'd
give your mind to this. You really ought not to let your wife and
children make trouble in the village."

Confound the fellow! He was smiling; there was a sort of twinkle in his
smile, too, that Malloring found infectious!

"No, seriously," he said, "you don't know what harm you mayn't do."

"Have you ever watched a dog looking at a fire?" asked Tod.

"Yes, often; why?"

"He knows better than to touch it."

"You mean you're helpless? But you oughtn't to be."

The fellow was smiling again!

"Then you