“You ain’t bred same as your sister. Put me in mind of my old setter. She had a litter of pups so different that you wouldn’t know they was come by same way.” He held out his hand. “Let me carry that case a bit of the way.”

Janet shook her head.

“Of course not, and when you next see your grandson you tell him that the women have got proud in this war, and won’t let you carry their luggage for them however often you ask them.”

The old man turned away, then struck by a thought he came back.

“We keep pigs, my wife and me. We got a right to kill one next month what hasn’t to go Lord Wooltonin’, but is for ourselves like. You step along down there and I’ll find you a nice pork chop. Reckon you can do with it after being bombed and that in Lunnon.”

Janet was charmed.

“I do think that’s kind of you, Mr. . . .”

“Jus’ Tom. Nobody don’t call me nothin’ different.”

“Well, Tom, I can’t tell you how nice I think you are, but I’m afraid I shan’t be here next month. I’m going to join the W.R.N.S.”

Tom gave a nod of acceptance, and climbed laboriously back into his taxi, but before he shut the door he leant out and gave Sheila a wicked grin.

“That offer of a chop was made to your sister, so it’s no good you steppin’ round, for it won’t be there, see!”

Sheila turned to Janet, her eyes blazing.

“I told you not to be familiar. You see what happens, they’re all just waiting to be rude.”

Janet picked up her suitcase.

“I shouldn’t mind him. I think he’s what’s known as a character. Do we go through this gate?”

In spite of her brave words to Tom, Janet found the suitcase appallingly heavy, but not so heavy that she could not manage to look around and love what she saw. A winding, white, dusty road lay through fields of what her town-bred eyes took to be very green grass. At its end she could see a farm lying behind another gate set in a stone wall. After some minutes walking they came to a track on the left of the road. Sheila led the way up it; she was still offended and said nothing, so Janet, not to re-open a sore subject, changed her suitcase from her right arm to her left without asking for the rest for which her muscles were crying out. At the end of the field they came to a gate in a fence. Janet put down the suitcase, not because of its weight, but from amazement.

“That’s not our cottage!”

Her obvious surprise made Sheila wriggle. Her voice was truculent.

“Yes, it is. Why not?”

“All that for ten shillings a week!”