But she could remember another day, more than thirty years before, when it was brown and oozy underfoot and there was nothing neat about it at all, and the mellow cry of well-fed cattle came from the dark doors of tumble-down sheds, and she was standing in the sunshine with two of the Berkshire piglets in her arms.  She had brought them out of the stye to have a better sight of their pretty twitching noses and their silken bristles and their playfulness, which was unclouded, as it is in the puppy by a genuine fear of life, or in the kitten by a minxish affectation of the same; and Goodtart, the cattleman, had drawn near with a “Wunnerful, ain’t they, Miss Marion?—­and them not born at four o’clock this morning,” when she heard the clear voice that was sweet and yet hard, like silver ringing on steel, calling to the dogs out in the roadway, “Lesbia!  Catullus!  Come out of it!” The greyhounds had, as usual, got in among the sheep on the glebe land opposite.  She ran forward into the darkness of the stye and put down the two piglets among the sucking tide of life that washed the flanks of the great old sow, but she could not stay there for ever.  Goodtart, who, being in the sunlight, could not see that she was looking out at him from the shadow, turned an undisguised face towards the doorway, and she perceived that the dung-brown eyes under his forelocks were almost alive and that his long upper lip was twitching from side to side.

She walked stiffly out, hearing the voice still calling “Catullus!  Lesbia!” and went in to the house.  But Peggy was baking in the kitchen and Grandmother was reading the Prittlebay Gazette in the parlour, and she went upstairs and threw herself on the bed.  She thought of nothing.  Her heart seemed by its slogging beat to be urging some argument upon her.  Presently she realised that he was no longer calling to his dogs, and she turned on her pillow and looked out of the big window into the farmyard.  He was there.  Cousin Tom Stallybrass, who had been managing the farm ever since Grandfather’s death, had come out and was talking to him, and from his gestures was evidently telling him of the recent collapse of the dairy wall, but he was not interested, for he did not point his stick at it, and in him almost every mental movement was immediately followed by some physical sign.  There was something else he wanted.  When the greyhounds licked up at him he thrust them away with the petulance of a baulked man, and whenever Tom turned his head away to point at the dairy he cast quick glances at the farm door, at the gate into the road, at the other gate into the fields.  She could see his face, and it was dark, and the lips drawn down at the corners.  What could it be that he wanted?