‘The time might come,’ Marion ventured, ‘when you’d mourned enough for Dick – it does happen – and perhaps Sir Hugh and Father John thought that time had come.’

‘Well, it hasn’t, and whatever they say, or anybody says, I know it never will. I wish they’d leave me alone. Thank you for the apples,’ and Hilda turned away and knelt down again, and Marion, after an embarrassed pause, departed, meeting a reluctant Sal on the threshold.

When she reached home she found Peter and Peterkin at peace with a lopsided, rather bendy basket emerging from their three and a half hands. She asked if anything had happened and was told that both the children had wanted to drink, so that although he was a man, Peter had taken the bucket and emptied it of the last of the russet apples, and gone down to the water-place and brought up a bucket of water.

This was an implied rebuke to Marion that she should have done this herself before leaving, but when he added, ‘Does seem we need another bucket. I’d better see to it,’ she was glad he had been reminded.

‘I saw Father John on the Common,’ Peter went on, ‘and he was going along our hedge, picking things. He had a nice new basket.’

‘Getting sloes to make his red wine for the church,’ said Marion. ‘Rather him than me drinking that stuff, sour enough to curl your teeth,’ an expression which made Peterkin giggle. But Marion suddenly realized what Peter had said. She turned to him. ‘Peter, how could you see who it was?’

‘I could see that rusty brown hood with a white bobble on top that Joan made him – that he always wears.’

‘And how could you see it was a new basket? He can’t have been very near, unless you followed him along our hedge.’

‘Well, I did see him, recognized him, saw the basket.’

‘Once upon a time you couldn’t have seen all that.’ They stared at each other in mutual surprise.

‘No, once I couldn’t,’ he admitted.

‘Do you think your sight’s better?’

‘Perhaps it is. Hadn’t noticed it specially, but now you say it I can see things further. I can see across the Hall now and, if the shutter’s open, can see quite clearly who’s where the other side of the Hall.’

‘Supposing you’d be able to plough now?’

‘Not likely in my old age, never having learnt it as a boy. Who’d trust his ox to me?’

Marion was astounded. She had never thought that Peter’s short-sightedness would improve.

He had been born short-sighted. It had been noticed by his mother when he was a tiny boy and finally accepted by his father, who while putting up a fence had told his five-year-old son to hold up the next post, some six feet away, in line and to mark the spot where it should be driven into the earth. The child Peter had said, ‘What post?’ and had had to be taken to it. ‘That? I can’t see anything that far off.’ The parents had shaken their heads and wondered what was to become of the boy – their only surviving child. Peter had also been born with an inherited right to strips of land but the impossibility of his ever being able to cope with the most ordinary agriculture was generally recognized. His father being dead, the rights to the strips were taken from Peter and the land was used by the Hall and Peter was apprenticed to the village carpenter with the understanding that he should work for the Hall as carpenter, doing whatever was needed, and that in exchange the Hall would work his land and supply him with so many sacks of corn from his old strips. The arrangement extended into the future in that should Peter have a son who would be capable of ploughing, the strips of land and its produce would revert to that son. It had all been discussed with Sir Hugh and Rollo, with the priest as witness, many years ago and no one forgot any detail of what was agreed.