nce into the Stoke Revel banking account, we hope."

"I'm not so sure about that!" said Carnaby; but he said it to himself,
while aloud he only asked with much apparent innocence, "Waller R. A.
wouldn't look at the cottage or the land without the plum tree, I
suppose?"

"Certainly not," Lavendar had answered. "The plum tree is safeguarded
in the agreement as I'm sure no plum tree ever was before. Waller R.
A.'s no fool!"

Digesting this information and much else that he had gleaned, Carnaby
now climbed to the top of a tree where he had a favourite perch, and
did some serious and simple thinking.

"It's a beastly shame," he said to himself, "to turn that old woman
out of her cottage. Cousin Robin thinks it's a beastly shame, and
what's more, Mark does, and he's a man, and a lawyer into the
bargain."

Carnaby thought remorsefully of a pot of jam which old Mrs. Prettyman
had given him once to take back to college. What good jam it had
been, and how large the pot! He had never given her anything--he had
never a penny to bless himself with; and now his grandmother was
taking away from the poor old creature all that she had. "It's
regular covetousness," he thought, "and that infernal plum tree's at
the bottom of it all. Naboth's vineyard is a joke in comparison, and
What's-his-name and the one ewe lamb simply aren't in it." He grew
hot with mortification. Then he reflected, "If the plum tree weren't
there, Waller R. A. wouldn't want the cottage, and old Mrs. Prettyman
could live in it till the end of the chapter." A slow grin dawned upon
his face, its most mischievous expression, the one which Rupert with
canine sagacity had learned to dread. He felt and pinched the
muscle of his arm fondly. (_Mussle_ he always spelled the word
himself, upon phonetic principles.)

"I may be a fool and a minor" (generally spelt _miner_ by him), he
said, as he climbed down from his perch, "but at least I can cut down
a tree!"

He became lost to view forthwith in the workshops and tool-sheds
attached to the home premises of Stoke Revel, and presently emerged,
furnished with the object he had made diligent and particular search
for; this he proceeded to carry in an inconspicuous way to a distant
cottage where he knew there was a grindstone. He spent a happy hour
with the object, the grindstone, and a pail of water. _Whirr_,
_whirr_, _whirr_, sang the grindstone, now softly, now loudly--"_this
is an axe, an axe, an axe, and a strong arm