Janet was troubled by her look and attitude, and being well aware that the two had had a long tete-a-tete the day before, wondered how things were going.  But she said nothing; and after breakfast Rachel joined the two girls in the potato-field, and worked as hard as they, hour after hour.  But her usual gaiety was gone, and the girls noticed at once the dark rims under her eyes.  They wondered secretly what Miss Henderson’s “friend” had been doing.  For that the “Cap’n” was courting their employer had long been plain to them.  Betty, of course, had a “friend,” the young soldier whose sick leave was nearly up, and the child’s deep velvety eyes were looking nearly as tired as Miss Henderson’s.  While Jenny, too, the timid, undeveloped Jenny had lately begun to take an interest in a “friend,” a young fellow belonging to Ellesborough’s forestry camp whom she had met in Millsborough the day of the Harvest Festival.  They had hardly exchanged half an hour’s real conversation.  But he had bought her some sweets at Millsborough, and walked a bit of the way home with her.  Then she had seen him in the village once or twice.  He had some relations there—­there was some talk of him, and that old murder at the farm—­she didn’t know rightly what it was.  But she felt somehow that Miss Henderson wouldn’t want to have him about—­Miss Henderson didn’t like talk of the murder—­so Jenny had never asked him to look her up.  But her raw, childish mind was full of him, and the ferments of sex were stirring.  In the secret opinion of both girls, “friends” were quite as much pain as pleasure.  No girl could do without them; but they were pretty certain to cause heart-aches, to make a girl wish at some time or other that she had never been born.  A London factory-girl would have expressed it in the Cockney way:  “Blokes are no good—­but you must have a bloke!”

The two girls then concluded that Captain Ellesborough had been causing trouble, as all men did, at some point; and being sympathetic little souls, they worked especially hard in the potato-field, and would not allow Rachel to carry the heavier baskets to the “clamp.”

Meanwhile Janet had been wrestling with old Halsey, till he had very reluctantly yielded to her persuasion, and returned to work.

“I’m not the man I wor,” he confided to Peter Betts, as they were eating their dinner under a hedge in the damp October sunshine.  “When I wor a young man, I wouldn’t ha’ minded them things, not if it was iver so.  But now they do give me the shivers in my inside.”

“What do?” said Peter Betts, with a mouthful of cold bacon.  He was still greatly in the dark as to why Halsey had left work so early in the afternoon the day before, and why he was now in such a gruff and gloomy mood.  There was indeed a rumour in the village that old Halsey had seen “summat,” but as Halsey had gone to bed immediately after Miss Leighton had had her say with him, and had refused to be “interviewed” even by his wife, there was a good deal of uncertainty even in the mind of his oldest pal, Peter Betts.