g sat down.

"Don't be such a blooming fool. Take off your gown if you're going to
stop."

Bunning meekly took off his gown. His spectacles seemed so large that
they swallowed up the rest of his face; the spectacles and the enormous
flat-toed boots were the principal features of Bunning's attire. He sat
down again and gazed at Olva with the eyes of a devoted dog. Olva
looked at him. Over Bunning's red wrists the brown ends of a Jaeger vest
protruded from under the shirt.

"I say, why don't you dress properly?"

"I don't know---" began Bunning.

"Well, the sleeves of your vest needn't come down like that. It looks
horribly dirty. Turn 'em up."

Bunning, blushing almost to tears, turned them back.

"There's no need to make yourself worse than you are, you know," Olva
finished his whisky and poured out some more. "Why do you come
here? . . . I'm always beastly to you."

"As long as you let me come--I don't mind how beastly you are."

"But what do you get from it?"

Bunning looked down at his huge boots.

"Everything. But it isn't that--it is that, without being here, I
haven't got anything else."

"Well, you needn't wear such boots as that--and your shirts and things
aren't clean. . . . You don't mind my telling you, do you?"

"No, I like it, Nobody's ever told me."

Here obviously was a new claim for intimacy and this Olva hurriedly
disavowed.

"Oh! It's only for your own good, you know. Fellows will like you better
if you're decently dressed. Why hasn't any one ever told you?"

"They'd given me up at home." Bunning heaved a great sigh.

"Why? Who are your people?"

"My father's a parson in Yorkshire. They're all clergymen in my
family--uncles, cousins, everybody--my elder brother. I was to have been
a clergyman."

"_Was_ to have been? Aren't you going to be one now?"

"No--not since I met you."

"Oh, but you mustn't take such a step on my account. I don't want to
prevent you. I've nothing to do with it. I should think you'd make a
very good parson."

Olva was brutal. He felt that in Bunning's moist devoted eyes there was
a dim pain. But he was brutal because his whole soul revolted against
sentimentality, not at all because his soul revolted against Bunning.

"No, I shouldn't make a good parson. I never wanted to be one really.
But when your house is full of it, as our house was, you're driven. When
it wasn't relations it was all sorts of people in the parish--helpers
and workers--women mos