Page:Jalna.pdf/239

 were a pleasant game. And yet, she reflected, they had their own troubles.

The front door was standing open, and Renny was in the porch, talking to a man whom Alayne knew to be a horse dealer. He was a heavy-jowled man with a deep, husky voice and little shrewd eyes. A raw blast, smelling of the drenched countryside, rushed in at the open door. The feet of the two men had left muddy tracks in the hall, and one of the clumber spaniels was critically sniffing over them. The other spaniel was humped up in the doorway, biting himself ferociously just above the tail. In the sudden twilight of the late afternoon she could not distinguish Renny's features, but she could see his weather-beaten face close to the dealer's, as they talked together.

After all, she thought, he was little better than a horse dealer himself. He spent more time with his horses than he did with his family. Half the time he did not turn up at meals, and when he did appear, riding through the gate on his bony gray mare, his shoulders drooping and his long back slightly bent, as likely as not some strange and horsey being rode beside him.

And the devastating fascination he had for her! Beside him, Eden upstairs at his desk seemed nothing but a petulant child. Yet Eden had bright and beautiful gifts, which Renny had neither the imagination nor the intellect to appreciate.

Rags's face, screwed up with misery, appeared around a doorway at the back of the hall.

"My word, wot a draught!" she heard him mutter. "It's enough to blow the tea things off the tr'y."

"I will shut the door, Wragge," she said, kindly, but, regarding her own offer with cold criticism as she stepped over the long plumed tail of a spaniel, she came to the conclusion that she had made it for the sole reason