nt upon his
scarlet face, Vince saluted him with:

"Hullo, Lobster!"

That name went like an arrow to the mark, and pierced right through the
armour of dense stupidity in which the boy was clad. Lobster! That
fitted with his father's weakness and the jeering remarks he had often
heard made by neighbours; and ever after the name stuck, and irritated
him whenever it was used.

It was used on the morning when Vince was thinking deeply of the
discovery of the previous day, and going over to Sir Francis Ladelle's
for his lessons with Mike. As we have said, he was saluted with coarse,
jeering laughter, and the contemptuous utterance of the words "Going to
school?"

Being excited, Vince turned sharply upon the great hulking lad, and his
eyes began to blaze war, but with a laugh he only fell back on the
nickname.

"Hullo, Lobster!" he cried: "that you?" and went on.

Carnach junior doubled his fists, and looked as if he were going to
attack; but Vince, strong in the consciousness that he could at any time
thrash the great lad, walked on with his books, heedless of the fact
that he was followed at a distance, for his head was full of kegs and
bales neatly done up in canvas, standing in good-sized stacks.

"I wonder how many years it has been there," he kept on saying to
himself; and he was still wondering when he reached the old manor gates,
went into the study, and there found Mike and their tutor waiting.

Both lads tried very hard to keep their discovery out of their minds
that morning, but tried in vain. There it was constantly, and
translated itself into Latin, conjugated and declined itself, and then
became compound algebraic equations, with both.

Mr Deane bore all very patiently, though, and a reproachful word or two
about inattention and condensation of thought upon study was all that
escaped him.

At last, to Vince's horror, things came to a kind of climax, for Mike
suddenly looked across the table at the tutor, and said quickly:--

"I say, Mr Deane!"

The tutor looked up at once.

"I want to ask you a question in--in--something--"

"Mathematics?" suggested the tutor.

"N-no," said Mike: "I think it must be in law or social economy. I
don't know, though, what you would call it."

"Well: let me hear."

"Suppose anybody discovered a great store of smuggled goods, hidden in
a--some place. Whom would it belong to?"

"To the people who put it there, of course." Vince's eyes almost blazed
as h