Now he had said too much.  Sabina would have agreed to the suggestion of a fortnight’s waiting, but the proposal that they should see less of each other both hurt and angered her.  The quarrel culminated.

“Caution seems to me rather a cowardly thing, Raymond, from you to me.  I tell you that your wife’s good name is at stake.  For, since you’ve called me your wife so often, I suppose I may do the same.  And if you’re so careless for my credit, then I must be jealous for it myself.”

“And my credit can go to the devil, I suppose?”

Then she flamed, struck to the root of the matter and left him.

“If the fact that you’re engaged to me, by every sacred tie of honour, ruins your credit—­then tell yourself what you are,” she said, and her voice rose to a note he had never heard before.

This time he did not call her back, but went his own way up the hill.

CHAPTER XIII

IN THE FOREMAN’S GARDEN

Mr. Best was a good gardener and cultivated fruit and flowers to perfection.  His rambling patch of ground ran beside the river and some of his apple trees bent over it.  Pear trees also he grew, and a medlar and a quince.  But flowers he specially loved.  His house was bowered in roses to the thatched roof, and in the garden grew lilies and lupins, a hundred roses and many bright tracts of shining, scented blossoms.  Now, however, they had vanished and on a Saturday afternoon John Best was tidying up, tending a bonfire and digging potatoes.

He was generous of his treasures and the girls never hesitated to ask him for a rose in June.  Ancient Mrs. Chick, too, won an annual gift from the foreman.  Down one side of his garden ranged great elder bushes, and Mrs. Chick made of the blooth in summer time, a decoction very precious for throat troubles.

Now Best stood for a moment and regarded a waste corner where grew nettles.  Somebody approached him in this act of contemplation and he spoke.

“I often wonder if it would be worth while making an experiment with stinging nettles,” he said to Ernest Churchouse, who was the visitor.

“They have a spinnable fibre, John, without a doubt.”

“They have, Mister Churchouse, and they scutch well and can be wrought into textiles.  But there’s no temptation to make trial.  I’m only thinking in a scientific spirit.”

He swept up the fallen nettles for his bonfire.

“I’ve come for a few balls of the rough twine,” said Mr. Churchouse.

“And welcome.”

An unusual air of gloom sat on Mr. Best and the other was quick to observe it.

“All well, I hope?” he said.

“Not exactly.  I’m rather under the weather; but I dare say it’s my own fault.”

“It often is,” admitted Ernest; “but in my experience that doesn’t make it any better.  In fact, the most disagreeable sort of depression is that which we know we are responsible for ourselves.  When other people annoy us, we have the tonic effect of righteous indignation; but not when we annoy ourselves and know ourselves to blame.”