"Yours, Mr. Hamon?" asked Gard--and the white horse flung up its head
and pealed out a trumpet-like neigh as though resenting the imputation.

"No," said old Tom, staring at the white horse under his shading hand.
"Seigneur's. What's he doing down here? He's generally kept up at
Eperquerie, and that's the best place for him. He's an awkward beast at
times. I must send and tell Mr. Le Pelley where he is."

The little cluster of white, thatched houses stood close together for
company, but discreetly turned their faces away from one another so that
no man overlooked or interfered with his neighbour.

Gard found himself in a large room which occupied the whole middle
portion of the house and served as kitchen and common room for the
family.

The floor was of trodden earth--hard and dry as cement, with a strip of
boarding round the sides and in front of the fire-place. Heavy oaken
beams ran across the roof from which depended a great hanging rack
littered with all kinds of household odds and ends. Along the beams of
the roof on hooks hung two long guns. One end of the room was occupied
by a huge fire-place, in one corner of which stood a new iron cooking
range, and alongside it a heap of white ashes and some smouldering
sticks of gorse under a big black iron pot filled the room with the
fragrance of wood smoke. In the opposite side of the fire-place was an
iron door closing the great baking oven, and above it ran a wide
mantel-shelf on which stood china dogs and glass rolling-pins and a
couple of lamps.

A well-scrubbed white wooden table was set ready for supper. On a very
ancient-looking black oak stand--cupboard below and shelves above--was
ranged a vast assortment of crockery ware, and on the walls hung
potbellied metal jugs and cans which shone like silver.

Two doors led to the other rooms of the house, one of them wide open.

One corner of the room was occupied by a great wooden bin eight feet
square, filled with dried bracken. On the wide flat side, which looked
like a form, a woman and a girl were sitting when the two men entered.

Hamon introduced them briefly as his wife and daughter, and, comely
women as Gard had been accustomed to in his own country of Cornwall,
there was something about these two, and especially about the younger of
the two, which made him of a sudden more than satisfied with the
somewhat doubtful venture to which he had bound himself--set a sudden
homely warmth in his heart, and made h