He crossed the shop. He did not hurry; there was no hurry left in him. He took her face in his two big, cold hands in the forge doorway, with the white lane and the whole Kynaston country behind her pretending to look at their horses, and kissed her, once, and it was not a short one. The red shawl slid off her hair and went down to her shoulders and stayed there, and her hands came up and held his wrists."That's the second," said Jethro Mabbott from his stool, to the fire. "I've no other objection."The Duchess of Brigstock did not turn round from the foot. Her husband, at the bellows, pulled the pole down long and let it rise, and the fire made its heart. On the green coat on the end of the bench, the cat shut her eyes again, and was not surprised; and out at the cross, after a decent minute, Sir Digby Kynaston blew his horn, and the hounds went away up the lane toward the Hall woods, and thirty horses went after them, carefully, on the frost, and not one of them looked back, and every rider did.The book paid out that evening in the Fleece's tap-room, and it paid to Jethro Mabbott, who had put a shilling on the Candlemas meet at nine to one before the duke had carried her through a meet at all, and who had looked like losing it for three mornings, and who collected in his gauntlets and put it in the poor-box at church on the Sunday, and said so to nobody.Enos Bletsoe stood the tap-room a round on the strength of losing, which was handsomely done. He married the carrier's daughter at Michaelmas, and never once in his life let the Fleece's flour go up a penny.Mrs. Pilbeam was the first person in Sedgebrook to call the cat Sheba to her face, and did it in the churchyard on the Sunday, in front of everybody, which was her apology and was accepted.The forge roof was mended over the coal-house in the week, at the Duke of Walsingham's charge, and the Duchess of Brigstock did not remark on it, and used the coal.The Fleece got its range after all. He bought it in April as a wedding present to Zadok Tinsley, and not to Abigail, and she allowed that, and her father said it drew well, and did not say anything else.They were married at Sedgebrook church on a Tuesday in April, when the ground was open. The settlement said in one flat line that Abigail Tinsley's portion was her own, and that the Fleece was and remained her father's, and that was the whole of the lawyers' part in it.