He spent the afternoon gun in one hand, a map in the other, beating the bounds of his lands.  They lay altogether in a shallow, uninteresting valley, flanked with woods and bisected by a brook.  Up stream was his own house; down stream, less than half a mile, a low red farm-house squatted in an old orchard, beside what looked like small lock-gates on the Thames.  There was no doubt as to ownership.  Mr. Sidney saw him while yet far off, and bellowed at him about pig-pounds and floodgates.  These last were two great sliding shutters of weedy oak across the brook, which were prised up inch by inch with a crowbar along a notched strip of iron, and when Sidney opened them they at once let out half the water.  Midmore watched it shrink between its aldered banks like some conjuring trick.  This, too, was his very own.

‘I see,’ he said.  ‘How interesting!  Now, what’s that bell for?’ he went on, pointing to an old ship’s bell in a rude belfry at the end of an outhouse.  ‘Was that a chapel once?’ The red-eyed giant seemed to have difficulty in expressing himself for the moment and blinked savagely.

‘Yes,’ he said at last.  ’My chapel.  When you ’ear that bell ring you’ll ’ear something.  Nobody but me ’ud put up with it—­but I reckon it don’t make any odds to you.’  He slammed the gates down again, and the brook rose behind them with a suck and a grunt.

Midmore moved off, conscious that he might be safer with Rhoda to hold his conversational hand.  As he passed the front of the farm-house a smooth fat woman, with neatly parted grey hair under a widow’s cap, curtsied to him deferentially through the window.  By every teaching of the Immoderate Left she had a perfect right to express herself in any way she pleased, but the curtsey revolted him.  And on his way home he was hailed from behind a hedge by a manifest idiot with no roof to his mouth, who hallooed and danced round him.

‘What did that beast want?’ he demanded of Rhoda at tea.

’Jimmy?  He only wanted to know if you ’ad any telegrams to send.  ’E’ll go anywhere so long as ’tisn’t across running water.  That gives ’im ’is seizures.  Even talkin’ about it for fun like makes ‘im shake.’

‘But why isn’t he where he can be properly looked after?’

’What ’arm’s ’e doing?  E’s a love-child, but ’is family can pay for ’im.  If ’e was locked up ’e’d die all off at once, like a wild rabbit.  Won’t you, please, look at the drive, sir?’

Midmore looked in the fading light.  The neat gravel was pitted with large roundish holes, and there was a punch or two of the same sort on the lawn.

’That’s the ‘unt comin’ ‘ome,’ Rhoda explained.  ’Your pore dear auntie always let ’em use our drive for a short cut after the Colonel died.  The Colonel wouldn’t so much because he preserved; but your auntie was always an ’orsewoman till ‘er sciatica.’

‘Isn’t there some one who can rake it over or—­or something?’ said Midmore vaguely.