talking to him.

With something of an effort Kit pulled himself up. He was a small
farmer's son and the Osborns were important people. He knew Osborn's
family pride, which he thought his daughter had inherited. In Osborn, it
was marked by arrogance; in the girl by a gracious, half-stately calm.
For all that, the pride was there, and Kit, resolving that he would not
be a fool, went to the post office and put Janet's letter in the box.




CHAPTER IV

THE PEAT CUTTERS


Osborn was dissatisfied and moody when, one afternoon, he stood, waiting
for the grouse, behind a bank of turf on Malton moor. To begin with, he
had played cards until the early morning with some of his guests and had
been unlucky. Then he got up with a headache for which he held his wife
accountable; Alice was getting horribly parsimonious, and had bothered
him until he tried to cut down his wine merchant's bill by experimenting
with cheaper liquor. His headache was the consequence. The whisky he had
formerly kept never troubled him like that.

Moreover, it was perhaps a mistake to invite Jardine, although he
sometimes gave one a useful hint about speculations on the Stock
Exchange. The fellow went to bigger shoots and looked bored when Osborn's
partridges were scarce and wild; besides, he had broken rules in order to