out of the window, but there was nothing to see save
the ha-ha, the coverts, the village spire, the cottage roofs, which for
so long had been her world.

"George won't come down here," she said.

"George will do what I tell him."

Again Mrs. Pendyce shook her head, knowing by instinct that she was
right.

Mr. Pendyce stopped putting on his waist-coat.

"George had better take care," he said; "he's entirely dependent on me."

And as if with those words he had summed up the situation, the philosophy
of a system vital to his son, he no longer frowned. On Mrs. Pendyce
those words had a strange effect. They stirred within her terror. It
was like seeing her son's back bared to a lifted whip-lash; like seeing
the door shut against him on a snowy night. But besides terror they
stirred within her a more poignant feeling yet, as though someone had
dared to show a whip to herself, had dared to defy that something more
precious than life in her soul, that something which was of her blood, so
utterly and secretly passed by the centuries into her fibre that no one
had ever thought of defying it before. And there flashed before her with
ridiculous concreteness the thought: 'I've got three hundred a year of my
own!' Then the whole feeling left her, just as in dreams a mordant
sensation grips and passes, leaving a dull ache, whose cause is
forgotten, behind.

"There's the gong, Horace," she said. "Cecil Tharp is here to dinner. I
asked the Barters, but poor Rose didn't feel up to it. Of course they are
expecting it very soon now. They talk of the 15th of June."

Mr. Pendyce took from his wife his coat, passing his arms down the satin
sleeves.

"If I could get the cottagers to have families like that," he said, "I
shouldn't have much trouble about labour. They're a pig-headed lot--do
nothing that they're told. Give me some eau-de-Cologne, Margery."

Mrs. Pendyce dabbed the wicker flask on her husband's handkerchief.

"Your eyes look tired," she said. "Have you a headache, dear?"

CHAPTER VIII

COUNCIL AT WORSTED SKEYNES

It was on the following evening--the evening on which he was expecting
his son and Mr. Paramor that the Squire leaned forward over the
dining-table and asked:

"What do you say, Barter? I'm speaking to you as a man of the world."

The Rector bent over his glass of port and moistened his lower lip.

"There's no excuse for that woman," he answered. "I always thought she
was a bad lot