a
looker. Why should I give you eighteen shillun a week as my
looker--twenty shillun, as I've made it now--when my best wether could
do what you do quite as well and not take a penny for it? You've got no
more sense or know than a tup ..."

She stopped, breathless, her cheeks and eyes burning, a curious ache in
her breast. The sun was gone now, only the moon hung flushed in the
foggy sky. Socknersh's face was in darkness as he stood with his back to
the east, but she could see on his features a look of surprise and
dismay which suddenly struck her as pathetic in its helpless stupidity.
After all, this great hulking man was but a child, and he was unhappy
because he must go, and give up his snug cottage and the sheep he had
learned to care for and the kind mistress who gave him sides of
bacon.... There was a sudden strangling spasm in her throat, and his
face swam into the sky on a mist of tears, which welled up in her eyes
as without another word she turned away.

His voice came after her piteously--

"Missus--missus--but you raised my wages last week."

Sec.19

Her tears were dry by the time she reached home, but in the night they
flowed again, accompanied by angry sobs, which she choked in her pillow,
for fear of waking little Ellen.

She cried because she was humbled in her own eyes. It was as if a veil
had been torn from the last two years, and she saw her motives at last.
For two years she had endured an ignorant, inefficient servant simply
because his strength and good looks had enslaved her susceptible
womanhood....

Her father would never have acted as she had done; he would not have
kept Socknersh a single month; he would not have engaged him at
all--both Relf of Honeychild and Day of Slinches were more experienced
men, with better recommendations; and yet she had chosen
Socknersh--because his brown eyes had held and drowned her judgment, as
surely as they had held her image, so dwindled and wan, when she looked
into them that evening, between the setting sun and the rising moon.

Then, after she had engaged him, he had shown just enough natural
capacity for her to blind herself with--his curious affinity with the
animals he tended had helped her to forget the many occasions on which
he had failed to rise above them in intelligence. It had been left to
another to point out to her that a man might be good with sheep simply
because he was no better than a sheep himself.

And now she was humbled-