yes all
round the room in horror and amazement.

'We'll see in the morning,' Armstrong said.

'All right,' answered Paul; and so finished his meal, and took his cap
from its hook behind the door.

'Where are you going?' cried his mother.

'That's my business,' said Paul, breaking into sudden passionate
defiance. 'What am _I_ flogged like a dog for? _You_ don't know. There
isn't one of you, from father down to George, who knows what I've been
doing. I can't remember an hour's fair play from the day that I was
born. Look here, father: you may take another turn at me to-morrow and
next day, you can come on every morning till I'm as old as you are, but
you'll never get a word out of me. I've done no harm, and anybody with
an ounce of justice in him would prove something before he served his
own flesh and blood as you've served me.'

He was in a rage of tears again, and every word he spoke was tuned to
the vulgar accent of his childhood. 'Father' was 'feyther' and 'born'
was 'boorn.' He did not speak like a poet, or look like one to whose
full soul all things yielded pleasure. These thoughts hit Paul, and he
laughed loud and bitterly, and went his way into the street.

The upshot of it was that Paul was flogged no more. Armstrong sickened
of the enterprise, and gave it up.

The lonely man was thinking of it all, seeing it all. Suddenly a voice
seemed to speak to him, and the impression was so astonishingly vivid
that before he knew he had answered it aloud. He started awake at the
sound of his own voice, and his skin crisped from head to heel.

'There's no rancour, Paul, lad?' the voice had said, or seemed to say.

'Rancour?' he had answered, with a queer tender laugh. 'You dear old
dad!'

For the first time the sense of an actual visitation rested with him,
and continued real. He felt, he knew, or seemed to know, that his
father's soul was near.

CHAPTER III

Paul was standing in a room in the old house in Church Vale, the room in
which the fiddles hung around the wall in their bags of green baize. A
sound of laughter drew him to the kitchen, and he had to make his way
through a darkened narrow passage, with the up-and-down steps of which
he was not familiar. At the turn of the passage he came upon a picture.

To the man at the tent door it was as clear as if the bodily eye yet
rested upon it.

The kitchen floor was of cherry-red square bricks; the door was open to
the June sunlight, framing its scra