nothing serious.
But the doctor says she must keep her bed for a week--and now she's
_got_ to. . . . There'll be a rumpus when she finds out," said John
Peter resignedly: "for she don't like clean clothes any better than I
do. But one likes to oblige a neighbour; and if he'd taken my trowsers
'twould ha' meant the whole household bein' in bed, which," concluded
John Peter with entire simplicity, "would not only be awkward in itself,
but dangerous when only two are left of an old family."

Cai agreed, if he did not understand. He reclaimed his musical box--
needless to say, John Peter had not yet engraved the plate--and carried
it home, promising to restore it when that adornment was ready. For the
next night or two it soothed him somewhat while he smoked and meditated
on public duties soon to engage his leisure. For he had been co-opted a
member of the School Board in room of Mr Rogers, resigned: and in Barber
Toy's shop it was understood that he would be a candidate not only for
the Parish Council to be elected before Christmas, but for a Harbour
Commissionership to fall vacant in the summer of next year.

The notification of his appointment on the School Board reached him by
post on the last Tuesday in September. Now, as it happened, the
Technical Instruction Committee of the County Council had arranged to
hold at Troy, some four days later, an Agricultural Demonstration, with
competitions in ploughing, hedging, dry-walling, turfing, the splitting
and binding of spars, &c.

Behold, now, on the morning of the Demonstration, Captain Caius Hocken,
School Manager and therefore _ex officio_ a steward, taking the field in
his Sunday best with a scarlet badge in his buttonhole, "quite,"
declared Mrs Bowldler, "like a gentleman of the French Embassy as used
frequent to take luncheon with us in the Square."

The morning was bright and clear: the sky a pale blue and almost
cloudless, the season--

Not yet on summer's death, nor on the birth
Of trembling winter,

--and Cai walked with a lightness of spirit to which since the quarrel
he had been a stranger. The Demonstration was to be held at the Four
Turnings, where the two roads that lead out of Troy and form a triangle
with the sea for base, converge to an apex and branch off again into two
County highways. The field lay scarcely a stone's throw from this
apex--that is to say from the spot where the late Farmer Bosenna had
ended his mortal career. It be