so soft and low as
he said to her the words he had said to me the night before, that I
slumbered in a dream. When I awoke suddenly he was raging at her, and
she cried. I know not why they quarrelled so quickly, but it was about
some one whom he called 'that fellow,' while she called him a 'friend of
papa's.' He looked at her for a long time again, and then said coldly
that he wished her a very good-evening. She bowed and went toward a
house, humming a merry air, while he pretended to light a cigarette made
from a tobacco of which he was very fond. Till very late that night I
heard him walking up and down the deck of the house-boat, his friend
shouting to him not to be an ass. Me he had flung fiercely on the floor
of the house-boat. About midnight he came downstairs, his face white,
and, snatching me up, put me in his pocket. Again we went into the punt,
and he pushed it within sight of the garden. There he pulled in his pole
and lay groaning in the punt, letting it drift, while he called her his
beloved and a little devil. Suddenly he took me from his pocket, kissed
me, and cast me down from him into the night. I fell among reeds, head
downward; and there I lay all through the cold, horrid night. The gray
morning came at last, then the sun, and a boat now and again. I thought
I had found my grave, when I saw his punt coming toward the reeds. He
searched everywhere for me, and at last he found me. So delighted and
affectionate was he that I forgave him my sufferings, only I was jealous
of a letter in his other pocket, which he read over many times,
murmuring that it explained everything.

"Her I never saw again, but I heard her voice. He kept me now in a
leather case in an inner pocket, where I was squeezed very flat. What
they said to each other I could not catch; but I understood afterward,
for he always repeated to me what he had been saying to her, and many
times he was loving, many times angry, like a bad man. At last came a
day when he had a letter from her containing many things he had given
her, among them a ring on which she had seemed to set great store.
What it all meant I never rightly knew, but he flung the ring into
the Thames, calling her all the old wicked names and some new ones.
I remember how we rushed to her house, along the bank this time, and
that she asked him to be her brother; but he screamed denunciations at
her, again speaking of 'that fellow,' and saying that he was going
to-morrow to Manitob