What Tod thought of all this was, perhaps, as much of an enigma to Tod as to his three brothers, and never more so than on that Sunday morning when two police constables appeared at his door with a warrant for the arrest of Tryst.  After regarding them fixedly for full thirty seconds, he said, “Wait!” and left them in the doorway.

Kirsteen was washing breakfast things which had a leadless glaze, and Tryst’s three children, extremely tidy, stood motionless at the edge of the little scullery, watching.

When she had joined him in the kitchen Tod shut the door.

“Two policemen,” he said, “want Tryst.  Are they to have him?”

In the life together of these two there had, from the very start, been a queer understanding as to who should decide what.  It had become by now so much a matter of instinct that combative consultations, which bulk so large in married lives, had no place in theirs.  A frowning tremor passed over her face.

“I suppose they must.  Derek is out.  Leave it to me, Tod, and take the tinies into the orchard.”

Tod took the three little Trysts to the very spot where Derek and Nedda had gazed over the darkening fields in exchanging that first kiss, and, sitting on the stump of the apple-tree he had cut down, he presented each of them with an apple.  While they ate, he stared.  And his dog stared at him.  How far there worked in Tod the feelings of an ordinary man watching three small children whose only parent the law was just taking into its charge it would be rash to say, but his eyes were extremely blue and there was a frown between them.

“Well, Biddy?” he said at last.

Biddy did not reply; the habit of being a mother had imposed on her, together with the gravity of her little, pale, oval face, a peculiar talent for silence.  But the round-cheeked Susie said: 

“Billy can eat cores.”

After this statement, silence was broken only by munching, till Tod remarked: 

“What makes things?”

The children, having the instinct that he had not asked them, but himself, came closer.  He had in his hand a little beetle.

“This beetle lives in rotten wood; nice chap, isn’t he?”

“We kill beetles; we’re afraid of them.”  So Susie.

They were now round Tod so close that Billy was standing on one of his large feet, Susie leaning her elbows on one of his broad knees, and Biddy’s slender little body pressed against his huge arm.

“No,” said Tod; “beetles are nice chaps.”

“The birds eats them,” remarked Billy.

“This beetle,” said Tod, “eats wood.  It eats through trees and the trees get rotten.”

Biddy spoke: 

“Then they don’t give no more apples.”  Tod put the beetle down and Billy got off his foot to tread on it.  When he had done his best the beetle emerged and vanished in the grass.  Tod, who had offered no remonstrance, stretched out his hand and replaced Billy on his foot.