days to burglary, has seven years' penal
servitude. No, Gedge," said I, gathering up the reins, "it can't be
done. You can't have it both ways."

He put a detaining hand on Hosea's bridle and an evil flash came into
his hard grey eyes.

"I'll have it some other way, then," he said. "A way you've no idea of.
A way that'll knock all you great people of Wellingsford off your high
horses. If you drive me to it, you'll see. I'll bide my time and I
don't care whether it breaks me."

He stamped his foot and tugged at the bridle. Two or three passers-by
halted wonderingly and Prettilove, the hairdresser, moved across the
pavement from his shop door where he had been taking the air.

"My good fellow," said I, "you have lost your temper and are talking
drivel. Kindly unhand my donkey."

Prettilove, who has a sycophantic sense of humour, burst into a loud
guffaw. Gedge swung angrily away, and Hosea and I continued our
interrupted progress down the High Street. Although I had called his
dark menaces drivel, I could not help wondering what it meant. Was he
going to guide a German Army to Wellingsford? Was he, a modern Guy
Fawkes, plotting to blow up the Town Hall while Mayor and Corporation
sat in council? He was not the man to utter purely idle threats. What
the dickens was he going to do? Something mean and dirty and underhand.
I knew his ways, He was always getting the better of somebody. The wise
never let him put in a pane of glass without a specification and
estimate, and if he had not been by far the most competent builder in
the town--perhaps the only one who thoroughly knew his business in all
its branches--no one would have employed him.

When I next saw Betty, it was in one of the corridors of the hospital,
after a committee meeting; she stopped by my chair to pass the time of
day. Through the open doorway of a ward I perceived a well-known figure
in nurse's uniform.

"Why," said I, "there's Phyllis Gedge."

Betty nodded. "She has just come in as a probationer."

"I thought her father wouldn't let her. I've heard--Heaven knows
whether it's true, but it sounds likely--that he said if men were such
fools as to get shot he didn't see why his daughter should help to mend
them."

"He has consented now," said Betty, "and Phyllis is delighted."

"No doubt it's a bid for popular favour," said I. And I told her of his
dwindling business and of my encounter with him. When I came to his
threat Betty's brows darkened.