“You plunged her into it a bit suddenly, poor child. You never warned her you were going to treat me as an invalid. Just as you’ve plunged me into it rather suddenly. I’m bored and I’m cold. If I must rest I’d like to come to it gradually, and not start on a wet, cold day.” Janet gave an exasperated movement. Maggie patted her shoulder. “I know, darling, just how you feel, but I know, too, just how Sheila and I are feeling. Now you put on the gumboots you’ll find in the passage cupboard and run along up to the farm. I’m going to take a cup of tea up to Sheila, and then I’m going to cook the dinner.”

The farm was a low-lying, white thatched building, with its innumerable barns, milking sheds and outhouses lying round it like a litter of puppies. The farm road curved through a white gate round the side of the house to the yard. Obviously that was the normal way of entry. There was a hedge dividing the road from the farm front garden. A little path ran in front of the hedge and the front door was reached through a latched gate. Janet stood a second considering. Should she ring the front-door bell and ask the housekeeper where Donald Sheldon was, or should she go on, and do as he had suggested, and ask one of his men where she could find him? The state of her boots decided her, she was much more fitted for a farmyard than a front door.

An aged man carrying a bucket was crossing the yard. He had a buff-coloured, wrinkled face, and buff-coloured, infinitely old clothes. He was like a leaf that had been lying where it fell since some long past autumn.

“Excuse me,” said Janet, “but do you know where I can find Mr. Sheldon?”

The man raised unexpectedly bright eyes and fixed her with a childlike stare. It seemed as if her question had a long way to go before it contacted his brain.

“Master,” he said at last, “he’m up to long acre.”

“Where’s that?”

There was another immense pause.

“A tidy step.”

“How do I go?”

“You do’ant. You bides here.”

Janet could not be impatient with anything so old, and, to her, rather pathetic. She spoke patiently.

“I must find him. Will you show me the way?”

An iron gate behind her clanged, and Donald came striding across the yard.

“There you are. Ben’s given you my message, I see.”

Janet smiled politely and waited until old Ben had plodded into a shed before she said:

“I didn’t exactly get a message, but then he’s very, very old, poor thing, isn’t he?”

Donald laughed.