Yes, he had need of sons; and when Jenny’s firstborn proved to be a girl he was sorely disappointed, and remembered, with raging bitterness, how, five months earlier, Tisha Shellett had borne his son for another man to play father to. He cursed this unwanted female child; he cursed the mother; he cursed the midwife he had lured with bribes and threats from Glatting City. And with these curses something of the devil went out of him. By now he had built another and a larger hut, leaving the old one to serve as a stable; and before Charity was two years old he was the father of a son and the master of twenty well-cultivated acres. No one challenged his ownership; no one wished to compete with the madman who had secretly set himself the gigantic task of taming this wilderness. He knew in his heart that not till the whole of Nightingale Roughs was yielding profit would he relax his gargantuan efforts; so year after year he went on, adding acres to acres and son to son (two branches of one endeavour), and sparing neither himself nor his wife. After five years of it he hired a lad from Glatting to help him, paying a shilling a day in winter and spring, one and twopence in haytime, and one and sixpence at harvest, with a reasonable allowance of small beer at all seasons. This modest outlay brought him a generous return; the farm increased more quickly than ever. He employed others and bought more stock. And with every day that passed he grew more cunning in his farmcraft; for he gave the whole of his quick mind to it. By keeping eyes and ears open he learned many a new device, so that before long he was spreading his land with a mixture of marl and dung, broadcasting seed by means of a newly invented machine instead of by hand, and taking care never to sow turnips before four in the afternoon lest they should suffer drythe. By the time Roger his eldest son was ready to take a share in the work, more than half the wilderness had been conquered; and, besides valuable grain and root crops, there was pasture for cows, grazing for a hundred head of sheep, a five-acre field of burnet and clover, and of sainfoin a fourteen-acre of which every unit could be counted on to yield three tuns of good hay. Noke was relentless in his industry, suffering nothing to daunt or delay him. In a certain time of disaster when he found himself short of horses, he harnessed a pair of bullocks to the plough, and laughed at the gaping astonishment he provoked: such a crazy thing, they said, had never happened in Sussex before. He was married to his farm and thought of nothing else. His sons to him were so much man-power; his wife was their mother; his daughter, for he had but one, was a useful milking and butter-making wench. He hardly noticed, and certainly gave it no thought, that Charity, in her late teens, possessed the same kind of plump seductiveness, and the same willingness to make use of it, as her mother had exercised upon himself two decades ago. But when she reached her middle twenties a fantastic idea flowered from the darkness within him. He began looking at his sons with new eyes. Manpower for the farm they were—but they were more than that. For he now entertained consciously a thought that must always have lain hidden in him somewhere: that these sons of his were in a sense, and a profoundly satisfying sense, extensions of his own being. He, Harry Noke, the man who had been reviled and pilloried by a pack of villagers twenty-five years ago, had so increased his substance, had waxed so great, that he was now more than a man: he was six men. Those five sons were each a living proof of him: he looked upon them with a sudden fierce satisfaction. But five was not enough. They had all been born in the first eight years, and then—no more. Why? He suspected Jenny of cheating him; and cursed her for it, knowing her to be now past child-bearing. He was crazy to prove himself further, to beget a numerous progeny. Why not let Charity take a turn, said his demon. The thought was quickly repudiated. He shrank from it, and for a moment hated the man his mirror shewed him: a lean, hungry-eyed, crafty old fellow, with a sharp nose, broad mobile nostrils, and a spade of black beard. But it returned at intervals, causing him a twinge of shame. Despite his angry and continuous endeavours, the gentler instincts of his youth were not yet utterly destroyed; and he raged inwardly, being at war with himself.