pearance of a restless old man at the
door of the cottage took him back to breakfast.

"I thought you'd run off," said his host, tartly.

"You thought wrong, then," said Flower, sharply, as he took out his
purse. "Here are two of the five pounds I promised you; I'll give you
the rest when I go."

The old man took the money and closed his small, hard mouth until
the lips almost disappeared. "More money than sense," he remarked,
cordially, as the skipper replaced his purse.

Flower made no reply. Some slices of fat bacon were sizzling in a pan
over the wood-fire, and the pungent smell of the woods, mixed with the
sharpness of the morning air, gave him an appetite to which, since his
enforced idleness, he had been a stranger. He drew his chair up to
the rickety little table with its covering of frayed oil-cloth, and,
breaking a couple of eggs over his bacon, set to eagerly.

"Don't get eggs like these in London," he said to the old woman.

The old woman leaned over and, inspecting the shells, paid a tribute
to the hens who were responsible for them, and traced back a genealogy
which would have baffled the entire College of Heralds--a genealogy
hotly contested by the old man, who claimed a bar sinister through three
eggs bought at the village shop some generations before.

"You've got a nice little place here," said Flower, by way of changing
the conversation, which was well on the way to becoming personal; "but
don't you find it rather dull sometimes?"

"Well, I don't know," said the old woman. "I finds plenty to do, and 'e
potters about like. 'E don't do much, but it pleases 'im, and it don't
hurt me."

The object of these compliments took them as a matter of course, and
after hunting up the stump of last night's cigar, and shredding it with
his knife, crammed it into a clay pipe and smoked tranquilly. Flower
found a solitary cigar, one of the Blue Posts' best, and with a gaze
which wandered idly from the chest of drawers on one side of the room
to the old china dogs on the little mantel-shelf on the other, smoked in
silence.

The old man brought in news at dinner-time. The village was ringing
with the news of yesterday's affair, and a rigourous search, fanned into
excitement by an offer of two pounds reward, was taking the place of the
more prosaic labours of the country side.

"If it wasn't for me," said the old man, in an excess of self-laudation,
"you'd be put in the gaol--where you ought to be; but I wou