cial question is of much importance. As long as
your tastes and your ideas aren't too different ..."

"I'm afraid they are, rather. But somehow we seem to complement each
other. She's so solid and so sane--there's something barbaric about her
too ... it's queer."

"I've seen her. She's a fine-looking girl--a bit older than you, isn't
she?"

"Five years. Against it, of course--but then I'm so much older than she
is in most ways. She's a practical woman of business--knows more about
farming than I shall ever know in my life--but in matters of life and
love, she's a child ..."

"I should almost have thought it better the other way round--that you
should know about the business and she about the love. But then in such
matters I too am a child."

He smiled disarmingly, but Martin felt ruffled--partly because his
brother's voluntary abstention from experience always annoyed him, and
partly because he knew that in this case the child was right and the man
wrong.

Sec.13

In the engagement of Joanna Godden to Martin Trevor Walland Marsh had
its biggest sensation for years. Indeed it could be said that nothing so
startling had happened since the Rother changed its mouth. The feelings
of those far-back marsh-dwellers who had awakened one morning to find
the Kentish river swirling past their doors at Broomhill might aptly be
compared with those of the farms round the Woolpack, who woke to find
that Joanna Godden was not going just to jog on her final choice between
Arthur Alce and old maidenhood, but had swept aside to make an
excellent, fine marriage.

"She's been working for this all along," said Prickett disdainfully.

"I don't see that she's had the chance to work much," said Vine, "she
hasn't seen the young chap more than three or four times."

"Bates's looker saw them at Romney once," said Southland, "having their
dinner together; but that time at the Farmers' Club he'd barely speak to
her."

"Well she's got herself talked about over two men that she hasn't took,
and now she's took a man that she hasn't got herself talked about over."

"Anyways, I'm glad of it," said Furnese, "she's a mare that's never been
praeaperly broken in, and now at last she's got a man to do it."

"Poor feller, Alce. I wonder how he'll take it."

Alce took it very well. For a week he did not come to Ansdore, then he
appeared with Joanna's first wedding present in the shape of a silver
tea-service which had belonged to his moth