FORE:"D?an't let me hear another word of that hemmed nonsense. If you think as Richard's bettered himself by running away from Odiam, you're unaccountable[Pg 395] mistaken. Wot's a dirty lawyer compared wud a farmer as farms three hundred acres, and owns 'em into the bargain? All my boys have busted and ruined them selves by running awayRichard's the only one that's done anything wotsumdever ... and if he's done well, there's one as has done better, and that's his f?ather wot stayed at home."CHAPTER VII.
FORE:But Reuben did not care. He had won his heart's desire, and public opinion could go where everything else he was supposed to value, and didn't, had gone. In a way he was sorry, for he would have liked to discuss his triumph at the Cocks, seasoning it with pints of decadent ale. As things were, he had no one to talk it over with but the farm-men, who grumbled because it meant more workMaude, who said she'd be sorry when all that pretty gorse was cleared awayand old mad Harry, now something very like a grasshopper, whose conversation since the blaze at Grandturzel had[Pg 456] been limited entirely to the statement that "the house was afire, and the children were burning."