"Nothing, good morning!"
"Good morning, Sir."
"Good morning! it was kind of you to push the chair up that hill. . . . I hope it wasn't heavy for you," said Connie, looking back at the keeper outside the door.
His eyes came to hers in an instant, as if wakened up. He was aware of her.
"Oh no, not heavy!" he said quickly. Then his voice dropped again into the broad sound of the vernacular: "Good mornin' to your Ladyship!"
"Who is your gamekeeper?" Connie asked at lunch.
"Mellors! You saw him," said Clifford.
"Yes, but where did he come from?"
"Nowhere! He was a Tevershall boy . . . son of a collier, I believe."
"And was he a collier himself?"
"Blacksmith on the pit-bank, I believe: overhead smith. But he was keeper here for two years before the war. . . before he joined up. My father always had a good opinion of him, so when he came back, and went to the pit for a blacksmith's job, I just took him back here as keeper. I was really very glad to get him. . . it's almost impossible to find a good man round here, for a game-keeper . . . and it needs a man who knows the people."
"And isn't he married?"
"He was. But his wife went off with. . . with various men. . . but finally with a collier at Stacks Gate, and I believe she's living there still."
"So this man is alone?"
"More or less! He has a mother in the village . . . and a child, I believe."
Clifford looked at Connie, with his pale, slightly prominent blue eyes, in which a certain vagueness was coming. He seemed alert in the foreground, but the background was like the Midlands atmosphere, haze, smoky mist. And the haze seemed to be creeping forward. So when he stared at Connie in his peculiar way, giving her his peculiar, precise information, she felt all the background of his mind filling up with mist, with nothingness. And it frightened her. It made him seem impersonal, almost to idiocy.
And dimly she realised one of the great laws of the human soul:
