They wouldn’t know. We could say we hadn’t seen her and then they’d…”

“No!”

His mother’s voice repeated the word sternly.

She turned away angrily and continued to set the table. Again she found relief, as the village women did, in scolding. Her voice ran on, with the words coming cold and sharp, to cover up her own feelings.

“Dogs, dogs, dogs!” she cried. “I’m fair sick o’ hearin’ about them. I won’t have it. She’s sold and gone and done with, and the sooner she’s out of my sight the better I’ll be pleased. Now get her out of here. And hurry up, or first thing you know we’ll have that Hynes comin’ ’round here. That Mr. Know-It-All Hynes!”

Her voice sharpened with the last words, for she pronounced them in imitation of Hynes’s way of speaking. The Duke of Rudling’s kennelman was from London, and his clipped Southern British accent always seemed to irritate the local people, whose speech was broad-vowelled and slow.

“Now, that’s my say,” Joe’s mother went on. “So you might just as well put it in your pipe and smoke it. She’s sold, so take her right back to them that’s bought her.”

Feeling there was no help coming from his mother, Joe turned to his father sitting before the fire. But his father sat as if he had not heard a word spoken. Joe’s underlip crept out stubbornly, as he sought for some new means of argument. But it was Lassie who argued for herself. Now that the cottage was silent she seemed to think all trouble was passed. Slowly she rose and, going to the man, began nudging his hand with her slim muzzle, as a dog so often will when it wants attention and comfort from its master. But the man drew his hand away from the dog’s reach and went on staring into the fire.

Joe watched that. He turned a soft argument on his father.

“Eigh, Father,” he said, sadly. “Ye might at least bid her welcome. It isn’t her fault, and she’s that glad to be home. Just pat her.”

Joe’s father gave no sign that he had heard his son’s words.

“Ye know, happen they don’t care for her right up at the kennels,” Joe went on, as if speaking to the open air of the cottage. “D’ye think they understand how to feed her properly?

“Now, for instance, look at her coat. It does look a bit poorly, doesn’t it? Father, don’t ye think just a bit o’ linseed strained through her drinking water would bring it up a little? That’s what I’d do for a dog that could stand a bit brighter coat, wouldn’t ye, Father?”

Still looking in the fire, Joe’s father began nodding slowly. But if he did not seem aware of his son’s attack, Mrs. Carraclough understood it. She sniffed.

“Aye,” she stormed at her son, “tha wouldn’t be a Carraclough—nor a Yorkshireman—if tha didn’t know more about tykes than breaking eggs with a stick.”

Her voice droned on in the cottage.

“My goodness, sometimes it seems to me that the men i’ this village think more o’ their tykes than they do o’ their flesh and blood. That they do.