ONE:"Why," replied Holgrave, imagining the exclamation addressed to him, "I suppose he has left the Essex men to try what can be done among the bondmen!"Where Ditch of Totease or Vennal of Burntbarns would have taken a couple of woodmen and a saw, Reuben took nothing but an axe and his bare arms. His muscles ached for this new carouse of exertion.
ONE:The Moor was on the eastern edge of the parish, five miles from Rye. Heaving suddenly swart out of the green water-meadows by Socknersh, it piled itself towards the sunrise, dipping to Leasan House. It was hummocked and tussocked with coarse grasshere and there a spread of heather, growing, like all southern heather, almost arboreally. In places the naked soil gaped in sores made by coney-warrens or uprooted bushes. Stones and roots, sharn, shards, and lumps of marl, mixed themselves into the wealden clay, which oozed in red streaks of potential fruitfulness through their sterility.
TWO:"By Heavens! they seem all conspiring to set my will at nought!he, at least should have better known what was due to the lord of this castle."At nights he slept upstairs in one of the attics, which always smelt of apples, because it was next to the loft where the apples were stored. He was happy there, in spite of some dark hours when the deadlock of his married life kept him awake. He wondered if there was a woman in the world who could share his ambitions for Odiam. He expected not, for women were an ambitionless race. If Naomi had had a single spark of zeal for the great enterprise in which he and she were engaged, she would not now be lying exhausted by her share in it. He had honoured her by asking her to join him in this splendid undertaking, and all she had done had been to prove that she had no fight in her.
