p, said "Thank you," and went away.

'That's all Margery wants,' he thought; 'the rest is nothing to me,'
and, getting on a bus, he fixed his eyes once more on the sky.

But George was not engaged. Like a wounded animal taking its hurt
for refuge to its lair, he sat in his favourite window overlooking
Piccadilly. He sat there as though youth had left him, unmoving, never
lifting his eyes. In his stubborn mind a wheel seemed turning, grinding
out his memories to the last grain. And Stoics, who could not bear to
see a man sit thus throughout that sacred hour, came up from time to
time.

"Aren't you going to dine, Pendyce?"

Dumb brutes tell no one of their pains; the law is silence. So with
George. And as each Stoic came up, he only set his teeth and said:

"Presently, old chap."

CHAPTER VII

TOUR WITH THE SPANIEL JOHN

Now the spaniel John--whose habit was to smell of heather and baked
biscuits when he rose from a night's sleep--was in disgrace that
Thursday. Into his long and narrow head it took time for any new idea
to enter, and not till forty hours after Mrs. Pendyce had gone did he
recognise fully that something definite had happened to his master.
During the agitated minutes that this conviction took in forming, he
worked hard. Taking two and a half brace of his master's shoes and
slippers, and placing them in unaccustomed spots, he lay on them one by
one till they were warm, then left them for some bird or other to hatch
out, and returned to Mr. Pendyce's door. It was for all this that
the Squire said, "John!" several times, and threatened him with a
razorstrop. And partly because he could not bear to leave his master
for a single second--the scolding had made him love him so--and partly
because of that new idea, which let him have no peace, he lay in the
hall waiting.

Having once in his hot youth inadvertently followed the Squire's
horse, he could never be induced to follow it again. He both personally
disliked this needlessly large and swift form of animal, and suspected
it of designs upon his master; for when the creature had taken his
master up, there was not a smell of him left anywhere--not a whiff
of that pleasant scent that so endeared him to the heart. As soon,
therefore, as the horse appeared, the spaniel John would lie down on
his stomach with his forepaws close to his nose, and his nose close to
the ground; nor until the animal vanished could he be induced to abandon
an attitude in