She put the one egg carefully on the shelf in the cottage and thought she might as well see what ripe dry peas there were while she was waiting for the goat to calm down, so she picked up her wide basket and went down the garden. Three hens and the cock were scratching about in the dying bean haulms. Marion concentrated on searching for peas. A sudden loud squawk and agitated poultry noises interrupted her and another hen flew up on to the fence from the far side. Marion ran to the fence and saw a young fox savaging another of her hens. She picked up a stone and with an aim she thought worthy of Peterkin, hit the fox on the shoulder. It dropped the hen and fled into the undergrowth. Marion dashed up the garden (glancing at Alice who was still peacefully playing), round the cottage, up the hill, and through the gate on to the Common, but by the time she reached her wounded hen it was dead – just a mess of blood and feathers. It was only a small pullet, nothing worth saving. She cursed the brazen fox, coming in broad daylight, and she cursed herself for not clipping the pullets’ wings so that they could not fly over the fence – but what could she have clipped them with, now that Dick Shepherd’s row of shears no longer hung in the next cottage? Having abandoned the remains of the hen to the bluebottles and the beetles, she went to the hawthorn to look at the goat. She was now peacefully grazing so Marion took up the abandoned bucket and sat down on the grass and milked, hoping that this rhythmical occupation would calm her annoyance.

Leaving the goat contented, she carried the bucket of milk back to the cottage and put it down carefully. Alice was down the garden and was wailing, ‘Mam – Mam – Mam!’ Marion went to her. There were lots of tangled threads round Alice’s ankles and round the stubble of a thistle plant, and Alice, in attempts to free herself had pricked her hands. Marion crouched down and with soothing remarks tried to free Alice’s legs.

A ghastly thought struck her – all this knotted twisted tangled stuff was her own spun wool! With a shout of anger at Alice, she traced back up the garden the tangled threads, sometimes mixed up with pea sticks, sometimes in coils on the grass, to the almost empty spool lying on the ground near the cottage. It was horribly apparent that Alice had got hold of Marion’s spindle and a fat spool of spun wool, both of which Marion had left on the log under the eaves the night before, and had played with the spool, unwound it, tangled it, thereby wasting hours and hours of work. Marion sat down on the log with her head in her hands to contemplate this further disaster. To her bitterness she added the recollection of her thought the evening before that she had left her work well out of Alice’s reach. A few months ago it would have been out of Alice’s reach, but the child had grown a lot this summer, and Marion had not reckoned on this.