and bits of food. She took a little milk from the yellow jug.
`How do you get your milk?' she asked him, when she came back to the
table.
`Flints! They leave me a bottle at the warren end. You know, where I
met you!'
But he was discouraged. She poured out the tea, poising the cream-jug.
`No milk,' he said; then he seemed to hear a noise, and looked keenly
through the doorway.
`'Appen we'd better shut,' he said.
`It seems a pity,' she replied. `Nobody will come, will they?'
`Not unless it's one time in a thousand, but you never know.'
`And even then it's no matter,' she said. `It's only a cup of tea.'
`Where are the spoons?'
He reached over, and pulled open the table drawer. Connie sat at the
table in the sunshine of the doorway.
`Flossie!' he said to the dog, who was lying on a little mat at the
stair foot. `Go an' hark, hark!'
He lifted his finger, and his `hark!' was very vivid. The dog trotted
out to reconnoitre.
`Are you sad today?' she asked him.
He turned his blue eyes quickly, and gazed direct on her.
`Sad! no, bored! I had to go getting summonses for two poachers I
caught, and, oh well, I don't like people.'
He spoke cold, good English, and there was anger in his voice. `Do you
hate being a game-keeper?' she asked.
`Being a game-keeper, no! So long as I'm left alone. But when I have to
go messing around at the police-station, and various other places, and
waiting for a lot of fools to attend to me...oh well, I get mad...' and he
smiled, with a certain faint humour.
`Couldn't you be really independent?' she asked.
`Me? I suppose I could, if you mean manage to exist on my pension. I
could! But I've got to work, or I should die. That is, I've got to have
something that keeps me occupied. And I'm not in a good enough temper to
work for myself. It's got to be a sort of job for somebody else, or I should
throw it up in a month, out of bad temper. So altogether I'm very well off
here, especially lately...'
He laughed at her again, with mocking humour.
`But why are you in a bad temper?' she asked. `Do you mean you are
always in a bad temper?'
`Pretty well,' he said, laughing. `I don't quite digest my bile.'
`But what bile?' she said.
`Bile!' he said. `Don't you know what that is?' She was silent, and
disappointed. He was taking no notice of her.
`I'm going away for a while next month,' she said.
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