with
him he broke into a passion of temper.

"What do you mean, Sir? It's offensive, I tell you: a downright
offensive, ungentlemanly thing to do! Yes, Sir, ungentlemanly!"
He crumpled up my verses and tossed them into the waste-paper basket.
"We had better get on with our Tacitus." And "Offensive!" I heard him
muttering once more, as he picked up the book and found his place.
I began to construe. His outburst had disconcerted me, and no doubt I
performed discreditably: but glancing up in some apprehension after a
piece of guess-work which even to me carried no conviction, I saw that
again he was not attending. After this, by boldly skipping each
difficulty as it arose I managed to cover a good deal of ground with
admirable fluency.

We dined together in silence that evening, and after dinner strolled out
to the big filbert-tree under which, for a few weeks in the year, Parson
West had his dessert laid and sipped his thin port--an old common-room
fashion to which he clung. To the end of his days he had the white
cloth removed before dessert, and the fruits and the one decanter set
out upon polished mahogany.

I glanced at him while helping myself to strawberries and cream. He sat
nervously folding and refolding the napkin on his knee. By-and-by he
spoke, but without looking at me.

"I lost my temper this afternoon, and I beg your pardon, my boy."

I began to stammer my contrition for having offended him: but he cut me
short with a wave of the hand. "The fact is," he explained, "I was
worried by something quite different."

"By John Emmet's death," I suggested. He nodded, and looked at me
queerly while he poured out a glass of Tarragona.

"He was my gardener years ago, before he set up market-gardening on his
own account."

"That's queer too," said I.

"What's queer?" He asked it sharply.

"Why, to find a gardener cox'n of a life-boat."

"He followed the sea in early life. But I'll tell you what _is_ queer,
and that's his last wish. His particular desire was that I, and I
alone, should screw down the coffin. He had Trudgeon the carpenter up
to measure him, and begged this of me in Trudgeon's presence and the
doctor's. What's more, I consented."

"That's jolly unpleasant," was my comment, for lack of a better.

The Vicar sat silent for a while, staring across the lawn, while I
watched a spider which had let itself down from a branch overhead and
was casting anchor on the decanter's rim.