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In having the law of ‘those two fellers,’ Steer had passed through an experience with his niece which had considerably embittered feelings already acid. The girl had shown a ‘ladylike’ shrinking from pressing a man who had ceased to want her. There was an absolute difference between her wishes and her uncle’s. He would not have young Bowden marry her for anything; he just wanted revenge on the Bowdens. She wanted young Bowden still; but if she couldn’t get him, would cry quietly and leave it at that. The two points of view had been irreconcilable till Steer, taking the bit between his teeth, had assured his niece that to bring the action was the only way of dragging young Bowden back to her. This gave him a bad conscience, for he was fond of his niece, and he really felt that to bring the action would make that fellow Bowden stick his toes in all the more and refuse to budge. He thought always of Bowden and of the five hundred that would come out of his pocket, not out of Ned’s.

Steer owned the local weed-sprayer, which, by village custom, was at the service of his neighbours in rotation. This year he fetched the sprayer back from Pethick’s farm just as it was on the point of going on to Bowden’s without reason given. Bowden, who would not have been above using ‘that chap’s’ sprayer so long as it came to him from Pethick in ordinary rotation, was above sending to Steer’s for it. He took the action as a public proclamation of enmity, and in ‘The Three Stars Inn,’ where he went nearly every evening for a glass of cider with a drop of gin and a clove in it, he said out loud that Steer was a ‘colley,’ and Ned wouldn’t be seen dead with that niece of his.

By those words, soon repeated far and wide, he committed his son just when Ned was cooling rapidly towards the girl Pansy, and beginning to think of going to church once more and seeing whether Molly wouldn’t look at him again. After all, it was he, not his father, who would have to go into the witness-box; moreover, he had nothing against Molly Winch.

Now that the feud was openly recognised by village tongues, its origin was already lost. No one—hardly even the Bowdens—remembered that Bowden’s dog had bitten Steer, and that Steer had shot it; so much spicier on the palate was Ned’s aberration with the girl Pansy, and its questionable consequences. Corn harvest passed, and bracken harvest; the autumn gales, sweeping in from the Atlantic, spent their rain on the moor; the birch-trees goldened and the beech-trees grew fox-red; and, save that Molly Winch was never seen, that Bowden and Steer passed each other as if they were stocks or stones, and for the interest taken in the girl Pansy’s appearance by anyone who had a glimpse of her (not often now, for she was seldom out of the farmyard) the affair might have been considered at an end.

The breach of promise suit was never mentioned—Steer was too secretive and too deadly in earnest; the Bowdens too defiant of the law, and too anxious to forget it; by never mentioning it, even to each other, and by such occasional remarks as: “Reckon that chap’s bit off more than he can chu,” they consigned it to a future which to certain temperaments never exists until it is the present. They had, indeed, one or two legal reminders, and Ned had twice to see Mr. Applewhite on market days, but between all this and real apprehension was always the slow and stolid confidence that the ‘Law’ could be avoided if you ‘sat tight and did nothin’.’

When, therefore, in late November Ned received a letter from the lawyer telling him to be at the High Courts of Justice in the Strand, London, at ten thirty in the morning on a certain day, prepared to give his evidence, a most peculiar change took place in that bullet-headed youth. His appetite abandoned him; sweat stood on his brow at moments unconnected with honest toil. He gave the girl Pansy black looks; and sat with his prepared evidence before him, wiping the palms of his hands stealthily on his breeches. That, which he had never really thought would spring, was upon him after all, and panic, such as nothing physical could have caused in him, tweaked his nerves and paralysed his brain. But for his father he would never have come up to the scratch. Born before the halfpenny Press, and unable to ride a bicycle, unthreatened moreover by the witness-box, Bowden—after a long pipe—gave out his opinion that it “widden never du to let that chap ’ave it all his own way. There wasn’t nothin’ to it if Ned kept a stiff upper lip. ’Twid be an ’oliday-like in London for them both.”

So, dressed in their darkest and most board-like tweeds, with black bowler hats, they drove in to catch the London train, with a small boy bobbing on a board behind them to drive the mare back home. Deep within each was a resentful conviction that this came of women; and they gave no thought to the feelings of the girl who was plaintiff in the suit, or of the girl who watched them drive out of the yard. While the train swiftly bore them, stolid and red-faced, side by side, the feeling grew within them that to make a holiday of this would spite that chap Steer. He wanted to make them sweat; if they did not choose to sweat—it was one in the eye for him.

They put up at an hotel with a Devonshire name in Covent Garden, and in the evening visited a music-hall where was a show called the ‘Rooshian ballet.’ They sat a little forward with their hands on their thighs, their ruddy faces, expressionless as waxworks, directed towards the stage, whereon ‘Les Sylphides’ were floating white and ethereal. When the leading danseuse was held upside down, Bowden’s mouth opened slightly. He was afterwards heard to say that she had ‘got some legs on her.’ Unable to obtain refreshment after the performance, owing to the war, they sought the large flasks in their bedroom, and slept, snoring soundly, as though to express even in their slumbers a contempt for the machinations of ‘that chap.’