for
the cattle's return. There were two houses, one for Jerseys (as Mrs
Bosenna explained), the other for Devons; and she drew his attention to
their drainage system. "If I had my way, every cow in the land should
be as cleanly lodged as a cottager. None of your infected milk for me!"

From the cow-houses she conducted him through the mowhay, where the
number and amplitude of the ricks fairly took his breath away.
"Oh, we call Rilla quite a small farm!" said Mrs Bosenna carelessly.
"But I could never endure to be short of straw. Clean bedding is a
craze with me." She halted and invited him to admire some details in
the thatching--the work of an old man past seventy, she told him, and
sighed. "Thatching's a lost art, almost. Too much education nowadays,
and everybody in a hurry--that's what's the matter. . . . In a few years
we shall all be thatching with corrugated iron."

"An' by that time every one will be in steam."

"Eh?"

"Shipping, ma'am."

"Ah, yes--to be sure. And everybody making butter with a County Council
separator. 'All very scientific,' I tell them, 'so long as you don't
ask me to eat it!' Why, look at this!" Captain Cai looked. She was
holding out her hand palm uppermost, and a very pretty, plump hand it
was to be sure.

"I should be sorry to say how many hundredweights of butter I've made
wi' that very hand--or how many hundreds of persons have eaten it."

Captain Cai dived his own hands into the hip-pockets of his new coat,
aimlessly searching for pipe and tobacco-pouch; not that he would have
ventured to smoke in her presence!--but it gave his hands something to
do.

"'Glad,' I think you must mean, ma'am," said he slowly.

She laughed. "If you're going to make pretty speeches, it's time for me
to run indoors," and she left him with a warning that dinner would be
ready in ten minutes, or at one o'clock to the tick.

This was by the gate of a broad-acred field ("Parc Veor" she had called
it) in which her Jerseys browsed. Captain Cai counted them--they were
five--while still half-consciously searching for pipe and pouch, which,
in fact, he had left behind in the shop, in the pockets of his old coat.
By-and-by he realised this, and with a curious sense of helplessness--of
having lost his bearings. . . .

Ten minutes later Dinah, coming across the mowhay to invite Captain Cai
into the house, found him leaning against the gate, sunk in a brown
study, contemplating the kine.

Th