t
burningly anxious to visit, and he promised the driver untold gold to
drive to some ancient flame of his--Helen Blazes, she was called.

"Aren't you coming, too?" he said, bundling his overcoat into his bag.

Now the fly had been so obviously sent to the doctor, and to no one
else, that I had no concern with it. Our roads, I saw, divided, and
there was, further, a need upon me to laugh.

"I shall stay here," I said. "It's a very pretty country."

"My God!" he murmured, as softly as he shut the door, and I felt that it
was a prayer.

Then he went out of my life, and I shaped my course for the
railway-bridge. It was necessary to pass by the bench once more, but the
wicket was between us. The departure of the fly had waked the navvy. He
crawled on to the seat, and with malignant eyes watched the driver flog
down the road.

"The man inside o' that," he called, "'as poisoned me. 'E's a
body-snatcher. 'E's comin' back again when I'm cold. 'Ere's my
evidence!"

He waved his share of the overcoat, and I went my way, because I was
hungry. Framlynghame Admiral village is a good two miles from the
station, and I waked the holy calm of the evening every step of that
way with shouts and yells, casting myself down in the flank of the good
green hedge when I was too weak to stand. There was an inn,--a blessed
inn with a thatched roof, and peonies in the garden,--and I ordered
myself an upper chamber in which the Foresters held their courts for the
laughter was not all out of me. A bewildered woman brought me ham and
eggs, and I leaned out of the mullioned window, and laughed between
mouthfuls. I sat long above the beer and the perfect smoke that
followed, till the lights changed in the quiet street, and I began to
think of the seven forty-five down, and all that world of the "Arabian
Nights" I had quitted.

Descending, I passed a giant in moleskins who filled the low-ceiled
tap-room. Many empty plates stood before him, and beyond them a fringe
of the Framlynghame Admiralty, to whom he was unfolding a wondrous tale
of anarchy, of body-snatching, of bribery, and the Valley of the Shadow
from the which he was but newly risen. And as he talked he ate, and
as he ate he drank, for there was much room in him; and anon he paid
royally, speaking of Justice and the Law, before whom all Englishmen are
equal, and all foreigners and anarchists vermin and slime.

On my way to the station, he passed me with great strides, his head high