om the scullery said it was a
lovely shot, and told him lunch was ready.

He spent the afternoon gun in one hand, a map in the other, beating the
bounds of his lands. They lay altogether in a shallow, uninteresting
valley, flanked with woods and bisected by a brook. Up stream was his
own house; down stream, less than half a mile, a low red farm-house
squatted in an old orchard, beside what looked like small lock-gates on
the Thames. There was no doubt as to ownership. Mr. Sidney saw him while
yet far off, and bellowed at him about pig-pounds and floodgates. These
last were two great sliding shutters of weedy oak across the brook,
which were prised up inch by inch with a crowbar along a notched strip
of iron, and when Sidney opened them they at once let out half the
water. Midmore watched it shrink between its aldered banks like some
conjuring trick. This, too, was his very own.

'I see,' he said. 'How interesting! Now, what's that bell for?' he went
on, pointing to an old ship's bell in a rude belfry at the end of an
outhouse. 'Was that a chapel once?' The red-eyed giant seemed to have
difficulty in expressing himself for the moment and blinked savagely.

'Yes,' he said at last. 'My chapel. When you 'ear that bell ring you'll
'ear something. Nobody but me 'ud put up with it--but I reckon it don't
make any odds to you.' He slammed the gates down again, and the brook
rose behind them with a suck and a grunt.

Midmore moved off, conscious that he might be safer with Rhoda to hold
his conversational hand. As he passed the front of the farm-house a
smooth fat woman, with neatly parted grey hair under a widow's cap,
curtsied to him deferentially through the window. By every teaching of
the Immoderate Left she had a perfect right to express herself in any
way she pleased, but the curtsey revolted him. And on his way home he
was hailed from behind a hedge by a manifest idiot with no roof to his
mouth, who hallooed and danced round him.

'What did that beast want?' he demanded of Rhoda at tea.

'Jimmy? He only wanted to know if you 'ad any telegrams to send. 'E'll
go anywhere so long as 'tisn't across running water. That gives 'im 'is
seizures. Even talkin' about it for fun like makes 'im shake.'

'But why isn't he where he can be properly looked after?'

'What 'arm's 'e doing? E's a love-child, but 'is family can pay for 'im.
If 'e was locked up 'e'd die all off at once, like a wild rabbit. Won't
you, please, look at th