could imagine his prized Clover Fairy would hardly fetch a hundred,
yet here was a piece of varnished canvas, painted by his half-brother,
selling for three times that sum. It was a cruel insult that went home
with all the more force because it emphasised the triumph of the
patronising, self-satisfied Laurence. The young farmer had meant to put
his relative just a little out of conceit with himself by displaying the
jewel of his possessions, and now the tables were turned, and his valued
beast was made to look cheap and insignificant beside the price paid for
a mere picture. It was so monstrously unjust; the painting would never
be anything more than a dexterous piece of counterfeit life, while Clover
Fairy was the real thing, a monarch in his little world, a personality in
the countryside. After he was dead, even, he would still be something of
a personality; his descendants would graze in those valley meadows and
hillside pastures, they would fill stall and byre and milking-shed, their
good red coats would speckle the landscape and crowd the market-place;
men would note a promising heifer or a well-proportioned steer, and say:
"Ah, that one comes of good old Clover Fairy's stock." All that time the
picture would be hanging, lifeless and unchanging, beneath its dust and
varnish, a chattel that ceased to mean anything if you chose to turn it
with its back to the wall. These thoughts chased themselves angrily
through Tom Yorkfield's mind, but he could not put them into words. When
he gave tongue to his feelings he put matters bluntly and harshly.

"Some soft-witted fools may like to throw away three hundred pounds on a
bit of paintwork; can't say as I envy them their taste. I'd rather have
the real thing than a picture of it."

He nodded towards the young bull, that was alternately staring at them
with nose held high and lowering its horns with a half-playful,
half-impatient shake of the head.

Laurence laughed a laugh of irritating, indulgent amusement.

"I don't think the purchaser of my bit of paintwork, as you call it, need
worry about having thrown his money away. As I get to be better known
and recognised my pictures will go up in value. That particular one will
probably fetch four hundred in a sale-room five or six years hence;
pictures aren't a bad investment if you know enough to pick out the work
of the right men. Now you can't say your precious bull is going to get
more valuable the longer you ke