ing on to the handle of the front
door. Of course it wasn't comic at all. But down in the village there
were both cricket teams, already a little tight, and the mad plumber
shouting 'Rights of Man!' They knew I was turned out. We did have a row,
and kept it up too. They daren't touch Wilbraham's windows, but there
isn't much glass left up at Cadover. When you start, it's worth going
on, but in the end I had to cut. They subscribed a bob here and a bob
there, and these are Flea Thompson's Sundays. I sent a line to Leighton
not to forward my own things: I don't fancy them. They aren't really
mine." He did not mention his great symbolic act, performed, it is to be
feared, when he was rather drunk and the friendly policeman was looking
the other way. He had cast all his flannels into the little millpond,
and then waded himself through the dark cold water to the new clothes
on the other side. Some one had flung his pipe and his packet after him.
The packet had fallen short. For this reason it was wet when he handed
it to Ansell, and ink that had been dry for twenty-three years had begun
to run again.

"I wondered if you're right about the hundred pounds," said Ansell
gravely. "It is pleasant to be proud, but it is unpleasant to die in the
night through not having any tobacco."

"But I'm not proud. Look how I've taken your pouch! The hundred pounds
was--well, can't you see yourself, it was quite different? It was, so to
speak, inconvenient for me to take the hundred pounds. Or look again how
I took a shilling from a boy who earns nine bob a-week! Proves pretty
conclusively I'm not proud."

Ansell saw it was useless to argue. He perceived, beneath the slatternly
use of words, the man, buttoned up in them, just as his body was
buttoned up in a shoddy suit,--and he wondered more than ever that such
a man should know the Elliots. He looked at the face, which was frank,
proud, and beautiful, if truth is beauty. Of mercy or tact such a face
knew little. It might be coarse, but it had in it nothing vulgar or
wantonly cruel. "May I read these papers?" he said.

"Of course. Oh yes; didn't I say? I'm Rickie's half-brother, come here
to tell him the news. He doesn't know. There it is, put shortly for
you. I was saying, though, that I bolted in the dark, slept in the
rifle-butts above Salisbury, the sheds where they keep the cardboard
men, you know, never locked up as they ought to be. I turned the whole
place upside down to teach th