try inland, straying scents of moss and primroses reaching out
towards the salt sea, calling men away from the wind-stung levels and
the tides and watercourses, to where the little inland farms sleep in
the sheltered hollows among the hop-bines, and the sunrise is warm with
the scent of hidden flowers.

Dick Socknersh began to look wan and large-eyed under the strain--he
looked more haggard than the shepherd of Yokes Court or the shepherd of
Birdskitchen, though they kept fast and vigil as long as he. His
mistress, too, had a fagged, sorrowful air, and soon it became known all
over the Three Marshes that Ansdore's lambing that year had been a
gigantic failure.

"It's her own fault," said Prickett at the Woolpack, "and serve her
right for getting shut of old Fuller, and then getting stuck on this
furrin heathen notion of Spanish sheep. Anyone could have told her as
the lambs ud be too big and the ewes could never drop them safe--she
might have known it herself, surelye."

"It's her looker that should ought to have known better," said Furnese.
"Joanna Godden's a woman, fur all her man's ways, and you can't expect
her to have praeaper know wud sheep."

"I wonder if she'll get shut of him after this," said Vine.

"Not she! She don't see through him yet."

"She'll never see through him," said Prickett solemnly. "The only kind
of man a woman ever sees through is the kind she don't like to look at."

Joanna certainly did not "see through" Dick Socknersh. She knew that she
was chiefly to blame for the tragedy of her lambing, and when her reason
told her that her looker should have discouraged instead of obeyed and
abetted her, she rather angrily tossed the thought aside. Socknersh had
the sense to realize that she knew more about sheep than he, and he had
not understood that in this matter she was walking out of her knowledge
into experiment. No one could have known that the scheme would turn out
so badly--the Spanish rams had not been so big after all, only a little
bigger than her ewes ... if anyone should have foreseen trouble it was
the Northampton farmer who knew the size of Spanish lambs at birth, and
from his Kentish experience must also have some knowledge of Romney
Marsh sheep.

But though she succeeded in getting all the guilt off her looker and
some of it off herself, she was nevertheless stricken by the greatness
of the tragedy. It was not only the financial losses in which she was
involved, or the derision