“I don’t think nought,” he said roughly in answer to Mrs. Jellison.  “Thinkin’ won’t come atwixt me and the parish coffin when I’m took.  I’ve no call to think, I tell yer.”

Marcella’s chest heaved with indignant feeling.

“Oh, but, Mr. Patton!” she cried, leaning forward to him, “won’t it comfort you a bit, even if you can’t live to see it, to think there’s a better time coming?  There must be.  People can’t go on like this always—­hating each other and trampling on each other.  They’re beginning to see it now, they are!  When I was living in London, the persons I was with talked and thought of it all day.  Some day, whenever the people choose—­for they’ve got the power now they’ve got the vote—­there’ll be land for everybody, and in every village there’ll be a council to manage things, and the labourer will count for just as much as the squire and the parson, and he’ll be better educated and better fed, and care for many things he doesn’t care for now.  But all the same, if he wants sport and shooting, it will be there for him to get.  For everybody will have a chance and a turn, and there’ll be no bitterness between classes, and no hopeless pining and misery as there is now!”

The girl broke off, catching her breath.  It excited her to say these things to these people, to these poor tottering old things who had lived out their lives to the end under the pressure of an iron system, and had no lien on the future, whatever Paradise it might bring.  Again the situation had something foreseen and dramatic in it.  She saw herself, as the preacher, sitting on her stool beside the poor grate—­she realised as a spectator the figures of the women and the old man played on by the firelight—­the white, bare, damp-stained walls of the cottage, and in the background the fragile though still comely form of Minta Hurd, who was standing with her back to the dresser, and her head bent forward, listening to the talk while her fingers twisted the straw she plaited eternally from morning till night, for a wage of about 1s. 3d. a week: 

Her mind was all aflame with excitement and defiance—­defiance of her father, Lord Maxwell, Aldous Raeburn.  Let him come, her friend, and see for himself what she thought it right to do and say in this miserable village.  Her soul challenged him, longed to provoke him!  Well, she was soon to meet him, and in a new and more significant relation and environment.  The fact made her perception of the whole situation the more rich and vibrant.

Patton, while these broken thoughts and sensations were coursing through Marcella’s head, was slowly revolving what she had been saying, and the others were waiting for him.

At last he rolled his tongue round his dry lips and delivered himself by a final effort.

“Them as likes, miss, may believe as how things are going to happen that way, but yer won’t ketch me!  Them as have got ’ull keep”—­he let his stick sharply down on the floor—­“an’ them as ’aven’t got ’ull ’ave to go without and lump it—­as long as you’re alive, miss, you mark my words!”