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 "I'll come down for my parcels later," he said. Easier to take them out at the farm, and he must fetch the milk.

Harriet opened the door.

"At last you've come," she said. "Something has happened, Lovat!" One of John Thomas' sisters came out too—she had come up with Mrs Somers out of sympathy.

"What?" he said. And up came all the fear.

It was evident Harriet had had a bad shock. She had walked in the afternoon across to Sharpe's place, three miles away: and had got back just at nightfall, expecting Somers home by seven. She had left the doors unlocked, as they usually did. The moment she came in, in the dusk, she knew something had happened. She made a light, and looked round. Things were disturbed. She looked in her little treasure boxes—everything there, but moved. She looked in the drawers—everything turned upside down. The whole house ransacked, searched.

A terrible fear came over her. She knew she was antagonistic to the government people: in her soul she hated the fixed society with its barrenness and its barren laws. She had always been afraid—always shrunk from the sight of a policeman, as if she were guilty of heaven knows what. And now the horror had happened: all the black animosity of authority was encompassing her. The unknown of it: and the horror.

She fled down to the farm. Yes, three men had come, asking for Mr and Mrs Somers. They had told the one who came to the farm that Mr Somers had driven to town, and Mrs Somers they had seen going across the fields to church-town. Then the men had gone up to the cottage again, and gone inside.

"And they've searched everything—everything," said Harriet, shocked right through with awful fear.

"Well, there was nothing to find. They must have been disappointed," said Richard.

But it was a shock to him also: great consternation at the farm.

"It must have been something connected with Sharpe—it must have been that," said Somers, trying to reassure himself.

"Thank goodness the house was so clean and tidy," said Harriet. But it was a last blow to her.