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‘But we only sat on cushions on the floor,’ said her master.

‘They’re too old for romps,’ she retorted, ‘an’ it’s only the beginning of things. I’ve seen what I’ve seen. Besides, they talked and laughed in the passage going to their baths–such as took ’em.’

‘Don’t be a fool, Rhoda,’ said Midmore. No man–unless he has loved her–will casually dismiss a woman on whose lap he has laid his head.

‘Very good,’ she snorted, ‘but that cuts both ways. An’ now, you go down to Sidney’s this evenin’ and put him where he ought to be. He was in his right about you givin’ ‘im notice about changin’ the pig, but he ‘adn’t any right to turn it up before your company. No manners, no pig-pound. He’ll understand.’

Midmore did his best to make him. He found himself reviling the old man in speech and with a joy quite new in all his experience. He wound up–it was a plagiarism from a plumber–by telling Mr. Sidney that he looked like a turkey-cock, had the morals of a parish bull, and need never hope for a new pig-pound as long as he or Midmore lived.

‘Very good,’ said the giant. ‘I reckon you thought you ‘ad something against me, and now you’ve come down an’ told it me like man to man. Quite right. I don’t bear malice. Now, you send along those bricks an’ sand, an’ I’ll make a do to build the pig-pound myself. If you look at my lease you’ll find out you’re bound to provide me materials for the repairs. Only–only I thought there’d be no ‘arm in my askin’ you to do it throughout like.’

Midmore fairly gasped. ‘Then, why the devil did you turn my carts back when–when I sent them up here to do it throughout for you?’

Mr. Sidney sat down on the floodgates, his eyebrows knitted in thought.

‘I’ll tell you,’ he said slowly. ”Twas too dam’ like cheatin’ a suckin’ baby. My woman, she said so too.’

For a few seconds the teachings of the Immoderate Left, whose humour is all their own, wrestled with those of Mother Earth, who has her own humours. Then Midmore laughed till he could scarcely stand. In due time Mr. Sidney laughed too–crowing and wheezing crescendo till it broke from him in roars. They shook hands, and Midmore went home grateful that he had held his tongue among his companions.

When he reached his house he met three or four men and women on horse-back, very muddy indeed, coming down the drive. Feeling hungry himself, he asked them if they were hungry. They said they were, and he bade them enter. Jimmy took their horses, who seemed to know him. Rhoda took their battered hats, led the women upstairs for hairpins, and presently fed them all with tea-cakes, poached eggs, anchovy toast, and drinks from a coromandel-wood liqueur case which Midmore had never known that he possessed.

‘And I will say,’ said Miss Connie Sperrit, her spurred foot on the fender and a smoking muffin in her whip hand, ‘Rhoda does one top-hole. She always did since I was eight.’

‘Seven, Miss, was when you began to ‘unt,’ said Rhoda, setting down more buttered toast.

‘And so,’ the M.F.H. was saying to Midmore, ‘when he got to your brute Sidney’s land, we had to whip ’em off. It’s a regular Alsatia for ’em. They know it. Why’–he dropped his voice–‘I don’t want to say anything against Sidney as your tenant, of course, but I do believe the old scoundrel’s perfectly capable of putting down poison.’

‘Sidney’s capable of anything,’ said Midmore with immense feeling; but once again he held his tongue. They were a queer community; yet when they had stamped and jingled out to their horses again, the house felt hugely big and disconcerting.

This may be reckoned the conscious beginning of his double life. It ran in odd channels that summer–a riding school, for instance, near Hayes Common and a shooting ground near Wormwood Scrubs. A man who has been saddle-galled or shoulder-bruised for half the day is not at his London best of evenings; and when the bills for his amusements come in he curtails his expenses in other directions. So a cloud settled on Midmore’s name. His London world talked of a hardening of heart and a tightening of purse-strings which signified disloyalty to the Cause. One man, a confidant of the old expressive days, attacked him robustiously and demanded account of his soul’s progress. It was not furnished, for Midmore was calculating how much it would cost to repave stables so dilapidated that even the village idiot apologised for putting visitors’ horses into them. The man went away, and served up what he had heard of the pig-pound episode as a little newspaper sketch, calculated to annoy. Midmore read it with an eye as practical as a woman’s, and since most of his experiences had been among women, at once sought out a woman to whom he might tell his sorrow at the disloyalty of his own familiar friend. She was so sympathetic that he went on to confide how his bruised heart–she knew all about it–had found so-lace, with a long O, in another quarter which he indicated rather carefully in case it might be betrayed to other loyal friends. As his hints pointed directly towards facile Hampstead, and as his urgent business was the purchase of a horse from a dealer, Beckenham way, he felt he had done good work. Later, when his friend, the scribe, talked to him alluringly of ‘secret gardens’ and those so-laces to which every man who follows the Wider Morality is entitled, Midmore lent him a five-pound note which he had got back on the price of a ninety-guinea bay gelding. So true it is, as he read in one of the late Colonel Werf’s books, that ‘the young man of the present day would sooner lie under an imputation against his morals than against his knowledge of horse-flesh.’