A SHEAF OF CORN

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Rose at Honeypot

The Patten Experiment

Olivia's Summer

A Lost Estate

The Parish of Hilby

The Parish Nurse

Gran'ma's Jane

Mrs. Peter Howard

A Winter's Tale

One Another's Burdens

There was Once a Prince

When Arnold comes Home

Moonlight

The Mating of a Dove

The Fields of Dulditch

Among the Syringas

Susannah

The Eglamore Portraits

The Memories of Ronald Love

A SHEAF OF CORN

BY

MARY E. MANN

METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON

First Published in 1908

CONTENTS

A SHEAF OF CORN

WOMEN O' DULDITCH

Dinah Brome stood in the village shop, watching, with eyes keen to detect the slightest discrepancy in the operation, the weighing of her weekly parcels of grocery.

She was a strong, wholesome-looking woman of three- or four-and-forty, with a clean, red skin, clear eyes, dark hair, crinkling crisply beneath her sober, respectable hat. All her clothes were sober and respectable, and her whole mien. No one would have guessed from it that she had not a shred of character to her back.

The knowledge of this incontrovertible fact did not influence the demeanour of the shop-woman towards her. There was not better pay in the village, nor a more constant customer than Dinah Brome. In such circumstances, Mrs Littleproud was not the woman to throw stones.

"They tell me as how Depper's wife ain't a-goin' to get over this here sickness she've got," she said, tucking in the edges of the whitey-brown paper upon the half-pound of moist sugar taken from the scales. "The doctor, he ha'n't put a name to her illness, but 'tis one as'll carry her off, he say."

"A quarter pound o' butter," Dinah unmovedly said. "The best, please. I don't fancy none o' that that ha' got the taste o' the shop in it."

"Doctor, he put his hid in at the door this afternoon," Mrs Littleproud went on; "he'd got his monkey up, the old doctor had! ''Tis a rank shame,' he say, 'there ain't none o' these here lazy women o' Dulditch with heart enough to go to help that poor critter