out the place--to see his big stooping figure blocked against the
sunset--to see his queer eyes light up with queer thoughts that were
like a dog's thoughts or a sheep's thoughts ... to watch his hands, big
and heavy and brown, with the earth worked into the skin ... and his
neck, when he lifted his head, brown as his hands, and like the trunk of
an oak with roots of firm, beautiful muscle in the field of his broad
chest?

Then Joanna was scared--she knew she ought not to think of her looker
so; and she told herself that she kept him on just because he was the
only man she'd ever had about the place who had minded her properly....

When evening came, she began to feel stifled in the house, where she had
been busy ironing curtains, and tying on her old straw hat went out for
a breath of air on the road. There was a light mist over the
watercourses, veiling the pollards and thorn trees and the reddening
thickets of Ansdore's bush--a flavour of salt was in it, for the tides
were high in the channels, and the sunset breeze was blowing from Rye
Bay. Northward, the Coast--as the high bank marking the old shores of
England before the flood was still called--was dim, like a low line of
clouds beyond the marsh. The sun hung red and rayless above Beggar's
Bush, a crimson ball of frost and fire.

A queer feeling of sadness came to Joanna--queer, unaccountable, yet
seeming to drain itself from the very depths of her body, and to belong
not only to her flesh but to the marsh around her, to the pastures with
their tawny veil of withered seed-grasses, to the thorn-bushes spotted
with the red haws, to the sky and to the sea, and the mists in which
they merged together....

"I'll get shut of Socknersh," she said to herself--"I believe folks are
right, and he's too like a sheep himself to be any real use to them."

She walked on a little way, over the powdery Brodnyx road.

"I'm silly--that's what I am. Who'd have thought it? I'll send him
off--but then folks ull say I'm afraid of gossip."

She chewed the bitter cud of this idea over a hurrying half mile, which
took her across the railway, and then brought her back, close to the
Kent Ditch.

"I can't afford to let the place come to any harm--besides, what does
it matter what people think or say of me? I don't care.... But it'll
be a mortal trouble getting another looker and settling him to my
ways--and I'll never get a man who'll mind me as poor Socknersh does.
I want a man with