Then Joanna was scared—­she knew she ought not to think of her looker so; and she told herself that she kept him on just because he was the only man she’d ever had about the place who had minded her properly....

When evening came, she began to feel stifled in the house, where she had been busy ironing curtains, and tying on her old straw hat went out for a breath of air on the road.  There was a light mist over the watercourses, veiling the pollards and thorn trees and the reddening thickets of Ansdore’s bush—­a flavour of salt was in it, for the tides were high in the channels, and the sunset breeze was blowing from Rye Bay.  Northward, the Coast—­as the high bank marking the old shores of England before the flood was still called—­was dim, like a low line of clouds beyond the marsh.  The sun hung red and rayless above Beggar’s Bush, a crimson ball of frost and fire.

A queer feeling of sadness came to Joanna—­queer, unaccountable, yet seeming to drain itself from the very depths of her body, and to belong not only to her flesh but to the marsh around her, to the pastures with their tawny veil of withered seed-grasses, to the thorn-bushes spotted with the red haws, to the sky and to the sea, and the mists in which they merged together....

“I’ll get shut of Socknersh,” she said to herself—­“I believe folks are right, and he’s too like a sheep himself to be any real use to them.”

She walked on a little way, over the powdery Brodnyx road.

“I’m silly—­that’s what I am.  Who’d have thought it?  I’ll send him off—­but then folks ull say I’m afraid of gossip.”

She chewed the bitter cud of this idea over a hurrying half mile, which took her across the railway, and then brought her back, close to the Kent Ditch.

“I can’t afford to let the place come to any harm—­besides, what does it matter what people think or say of me?  I don’t care....  But it’ll be a mortal trouble getting another looker and settling him to my ways—­and I’ll never get a man who’ll mind me as poor Socknersh does.  I want a man with a humble soul, but seemingly you can’t get that through advertising....”

She had come to the bridge over the Kent Ditch, and Sussex ended in a swamp of reeds.  Looking southward she saw the boundaries of her own land, the Kent Innings, dotted with sheep, and the shepherd’s cottage among them, its roof standing out a bright orange under the fleece of lichen that smothered the tiles.  It suddenly struck her that a good way out of her difficulty might be a straight talk with Socknersh.  He would probably be working in his garden now, having those few evening hours as his own.  Straining her eyes into the shining thickness of mist and sun, she thought she could see his blue shirt moving among the bean-rows and hollyhocks around the little place.

“I’ll go and see him and talk it out—­I’ll tell him that if he won’t have proper sense he must go.  I’ve been soft, putting up with him all this time.”