ay it
if you think I ought to. Only stand by if you happen to be anywhere
about. By the by, I hope I shall have some kind of a scrap with Roper
before the morning's over. I shall enjoy that. Infernal little beast, I
caught him out last night. I can't tell you how; but unless he's off by
the eight o'clock to-morrow, he's in for punishment."

Lionel laughed.

"All right," he said; "don't murder him. I'm going to turn in now. Sorry
about Bouncing. Did he have a bad time, poor chap?"

"No," said Winn, "not really. He had a jolly sight harder time living;
and yet I believe he'd have swopped with me at the end. Funny how little
we know what the other fellow feels!"

"We can get an idea sometimes," Lionel said in a queer voice, with his
back to his friend. Winn hastened to the door of his room. He knew that
Lionel had an idea. He said, as he half closed the door on himself:

"Thanks awfully for the whiskey."

CHAPTER XX

Unfortunately, Winn was not permitted the pleasure of punishing Mr.
Roper in the morning. Mr. Roper thought the matter over for the greater
part of an unpleasantly short night. He knew that he could prepare a
perfect case, he could easily clear himself to his pupil, he could stand
by his guns, and probably even succeed in making Mrs. Bouncing stand by
hers; but he didn't want to be thrashed. Whatever else happened, he knew
that he could not get out of this. Winn meant to thrash him, and Winn
would thrash him. People like Winn could not be manipulated; they could
only be avoided. They weren't afraid of being arrested, and they didn't
care anything about being fined. They damned the consequences of their
ferocious acts; and if you happened to be one of the consequences and
had a constitutional shrinking from being damned, it was wiser to pack
early and be off by an eight o'clock train.

Winn was extremely disappointed at this decision; it robbed him of
something which, as he thought, would have cleared the air. However, he
spent a busy morning in assisting Mrs. Bouncing. She was querulous and
tearful and wanted better dressmakers and a more becoming kind of
mourning than it was easy to procure in Davos. It seemed to Winn as if
she was under the impression that mourning was more important to a
funeral than a coffin; but when it came to the coffin, she had terrible
ideas about lilies embroidered in silver, which upset Winn very much.

Mr. Bouncing had always objected to lilies. He considered that