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 right. In a moment he expressed his pleasure, much to her comfort.

“This is the sort of country I thought you'd live in, Mary,” he said, pushing his hat back on his head, and looking about him. “Real country. No gentlemen’s seats.”

He snuffed the air, and felt more keenly than he had done for many weeks the pleasure of owning a body.

“Now we have to find our way through a hedge,” said Mary. In the gap of the hedge Ralph tore up a poacher’s wire, set across a hole to trap a rabbit.

“It’s quite right that they should poach,” said Mary, watching him tugging at the wire. “I wonder whether it was Alfred Duggins or Sid Rankin? How can one expect them not to, when they only make fifteen shillings a week? Fifteen shillings a week,” she repeated, coming out on the other side of the hedge, and running her fingers through her hair to rid herself of a bramble which had attached itself to her. “I could live on fifteen shillings a week—easily.”

“Could you?” said Ralph. “I don’t believe you could,” he added.

“Oh yes. They have a cottage thrown in, and a garden where one can grow vegetables. It wouldn’t be half bad,” said Mary, with a soberness which impressed Ralph very much.

“But you'd get tired of it,” he urged.

“I sometimes think it’s the only thing one would never get tired of,” she replied.

The idea of a cottage where one grew one’s own vegetables and lived on fifteen shillings a week, filled Ralph with an extraordinary sense of rest and satisfaction.

“But wouldn’t it be on the main road, or next door to a woman with six squalling children, who’d always be hanging her washing out to dry across your garden?”