“You are both much too young — ” began Jocelyn.

“No, really, sir, that won’t do. What you mean is that Dinah is too poor. If it had been somebody smarter and richer, you and my dear cousin Eleanor wouldn’t have talked about youth. Don’t let’s pretend.”

“And don’t you talk to me like a damned sententious young puppy, Henry, because I won’t have it.”

“I’m sorry,” said Henry, “I know I’m being tiresome.”

“You’re being extremely tiresome. Very well, I’ll speak as plainly as you like. Pen Cuckoo means more to me and should mean more to you, than anything else is life. You know as well as I do that we’re damned hard up. There are all sorts of things that should be done to the place. Those cottages up at Cloudyfold! Winton! Rumbold tells me that Winton’ll leak like a basket if we don’t fix up the roof. The point is — ”

“I can’t afford to make a poor marriage?”

“If you choose to put it like that”

“How else can one put it?”

“Very well, then.”

“Well, since we must speak in terms of hard cash, which I assure you I don’t enjoy, Dinah won’t always be the poor parson’s one ewe lamb.”

“What d’you mean?” asked Jocelyn, uneasily, but with a certain air of pricking up his ears.

“I thought everybody knew Miss Campanula has left all her filthy lucre, or most of it, to the rector. Don’t pretend, father; you must have heard that piece of gossip. The cook and housemaid witnessed the will and the housemaid overheard Miss C. bawling about it to her lawyer. Dinah doesn’t want the money and nor do I— much — but that’s what’ll happen to it eventually.”

“Servant’s gossip,” muttered the squire. “Most distasteful. Anyway, it may not — she may change her mind. It’s now we’re so damned hard-up.”

“Let me find a job of work,” Henry said.