ou to do, something for me. I want you to go to
Merefield and see, first, Jenny, and then my father; and tell
them quite plainly and simply that I've been in prison for a
fortnight. I want Jenny to know first, so that she can think of
what to say to my father. The thing I was sent to prison for
was that I pleaded guilty to stealing a tin of salmon from a
child called Mary Cooper. You can see the account of the case
in the County Gazette for last Saturday week, the
twenty-seventh. The thing I really did was to take the tin from
somebody else I was traveling with. He asked me to.

"Next, I want you to send on any letters that may have come for
me to the address I enclose on a separate piece of paper.
Please destroy the address at once; but you can show this
letter to Jenny and give her my love. You are not to come and
see me. If you don't, I'll come and see you soon.

"Things are pretty bad just now, but I'm going to go through
with it.

"Yours,

"F.

"P.S.--By the way, please address me as Mr. F. Gregory when you
write."

* * * * *

He was perfectly obstinate, you understand, still.

* * * * *

Frank's troubles as regards prison were by no means exhausted by his
distressing conversation with the young ladies in the post office, and
the next one fell on him as he was leaving the little town early on the
Saturday morning.

He had just turned out of the main street and was going up a quiet side
lane that looked as if it would lead to the York Road, when he noticed
a disagreeable little scene proceeding up a narrow _cul-de-sac_ across
whose mouth he was passing.

A tall, loose-limbed young man, in his working-clothes, obviously
slightly excited with drink, had hold of a miserable old man by the
scruff of the neck with one hand, and was cuffing him with the other.

Now I do not wish to represent Frank as a sort of knight-errant, but the
fact is that if anyone with respectable and humane ideas goes on the
tramp (I have this from the mouth of experienced persons) he has to make
up his mind fairly soon either to be a redresser of wrongs or to be
conveniently short-sighted. Frank was not yet sufficiently experienced
to have learned the wisdom of the second alternative.

He went straight up the _cul-de-sac_ and without any words at all hit
the young man