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Now that the feud was openly recognised by village tongues, its origin was already lost. No one—hardly even the Bowdens—remembered that Bowden’s dog had bitten Steer, and that Steer had shot it; so much spicier on the palate was Ned’s aberration with the girl Pansy, and its questionable consequences. Corn harvest passed, and bracken harvest; the autumn gales, sweeping in from the Atlantic, spent their rain on the moor; the birch-trees goldened and the beech-trees grew fox-red; and, save that Molly Winch was never seen, that Bowden and Steer passed each other as if they were stocks or stones, and for the interest taken in the girl Pansy’s appearance by anyone who had a glimpse of her (not often now, for she was seldom out of the farmyard) the affair might have been considered at an end.

The breach of promise suit was never mentioned—Steer was too secretive and too deadly in earnest; the Bowdens too defiant of the law, and too anxious to forget it; by never mentioning it, even to each other, and by such occasional remarks as: “Reckon that chap’s bit off more than he can chu,” they consigned it to a future which to certain temperaments never exists until it is the present. They had, indeed, one or two legal reminders, and Ned had twice to see Mr. Applewhite on market days, but between all this and real apprehension was always the slow and stolid confidence that the ‘Law’ could be avoided if you ‘sat tight and did nothin’.’