as an ill-used person.

I do not like to set down here, even if I could, all the considerations
that had passed through Dick's mind since a quarter-past eleven, simply
because the very statement of them would give a false impression. Dick
was not a knave, and he did not deceive himself about himself more than
most of us do. Yet he had considered a number of points that, strictly
speaking, he ought not to have considered. He had wondered whether Frank
would die; he had wondered whether, if he did not, Lord Talgarth would
really be as good as his word; and, if so, what effect that would have
on Jenny. Finally, he had wondered, with a good deal of intellectual
application, what exactly Jenny had meant when she had announced all
that about the telegram she was going to send in Lord Talgarth's name,
and the letter she was going to send in her own. (He had asked Archie
just now in the smoking-room, and he, too, had confessed himself beaten.
Only, he had been quite sure that jenny would get her way and obtain
Frank's forgiveness.)

Also, in the course of his three-quarters of an hour he had considered,
for perhaps the hundredth time since he had come to the age of
discretion, what exactly three lives between a man and a title stood
for. Lord Talgarth was old and gouty; Archie was not married, and showed
no signs of it; and Frank--well, Frank was always adventurous and
always in trouble.

Well, I have set down the points, after all. But it must not be thought
that the gentleman with the pointed brown beard and thoughtful eyes, who
at five minutes past twelve went up the two steps into the smoking-room,
locked the doors, as he had been directed, took up his candle and went
to bed, went with an uneasy conscience, or, in fact, was a villain in
any way whatever.

CHAPTER III

(I)

The first spot in Frank's pilgrimage which I have been able to visit and
identify in such a way that I am able to form to myself a picture of his
adventure more or less complete in all its parts, lies about ten miles
north-west of Doncaster, in a little valley, where curiously enough
another pilgrim named Richard lived for a little while nearly six
hundred years ago.

Up to the time of Frank's coming there, in the season of hay-making,
numberless little incidents of his experience stand out, vivid, indeed,
but fragmentary, yet they do not form to my mind a coherent whole. I
think I understand to some extent the process by which he became