The news was true. The life — the one fragile life — that had been used as a measuring-tape of time by law, was in danger of being frayed¹ away. It was the last of a group of lives which had served this purpose, at the end of whose breathings the small homestead occupied by South himself, the larger one of Giles Winterborne, and half a dozen others that had been in the possession of various Hintock village families for the previous hundred years, and were now Winterborne’s, would fall in and become part of the encompassing² estate.

Yet a short two months earlier Marty’s father, aged³ fifty-five years, though something of a fidgety, anxious being, would have been looked on as a man whose existence was so far removed from hazardous⁴ as any in the parish, and as bidding fair to be prolonged for another quarter of a century.

Winterborne walked up and down his garden next day thinking of the contingency⁵. The sense that the paths he was pacing, the cabbage-plots, the apple-trees, his dwelling⁶, cider-cellar, wring-house, stables, and weathercock, were all slipping away over his head and beneath his feet, as if they were painted on a magic-lantern slide, was curious. In spite of John South’s late indisposition he had not anticipated danger. To inquire concerning his health had been to show less sympathy than to remain silent, considering the material interest he possessed⁷ in the woodman’s life, and he had, accordingly, made a point of avoiding Marty’s house.

While he was here in the garden somebody came to fetch him. It was Marty herself, and she showed her distress⁸ by her unconsciousness of a cropped poll.

“Father is still so much troubled in his mind about that tree,” she said. “You know the tree I mean, Mr. Winterborne? the tall one in front of the house, that he thinks will blow down and kill us. Can you come and see if you can persuade him out of his notion? I can do nothing.”

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