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Molly Winch silently slipped off her amethyst engagement ring, and gave it him.

Steer put on his best hat, breeches and gaiters, took a thin stick, and set out.

Corn harvest was coming near, and he crossed a field of his own wheat into a field of Bowden’s oats. Steer was the only farmer round about who grew wheat. Wheat! In Bowden’s view it was all his politics! But Steer was thinking: ‘My wheat’s lookin’ well—don’t think much of these oats' (another of his ‘foreign expressions’; oats were ‘corn’ to Bowden). ‘He’ll have no straw.’

He had not been in Bowden’s yard since the day he executed the yellow whippet dog, and his calf twitched—the brute had given it a shrewd nip.

The girl Pansy opened the door to him. And, seeing the flush rise into her pale cheeks, he thought: ‘If I were to lay my stick across your back you’d know it, my girl.’

Bowden had just finished his supper of bacon, beans and cider, and was smoking his pipe before the embers of a wood fire. He did not get up, and there seemed to Steer something studied and insulting in the way he nodded to a chair. He sat down with his stick across his knees, while the girl went quickly out.