“Indeed you had, boy.  Bother poets, and the day they first began to breed in Whitbury!  Such an evening spoilt!  Have a cup of coffee?  No? then a glass of sherry?”

Out went Tom.  Mrs. Brown had been up, and seen him seemingly sleeping; then had heard him run downstairs hurriedly.  He passed her in the passage, looking very wild.  “Seemed, sir, just like my nevy’s wife’s brother, Will Ford, before he made away with hes’self.”

Tom goes off post haste, revolving many things in a crafty heart.  Then he steers for Bolus’s shop.  Bolus is at “The Angler’s Arms;” but his assistant is in.

“Did a gentleman call here just now, in a long cloak, with a felt wide-awake?”

“Yes.”  And the assistant looks confused enough for Tom to rejoin,—­

“And you sold him laudanum?”

“Why—­ah—­”

“And you had sold him laudanum already this afternoon, you young rascal?  How dare you, twice in six hours?  I’ll hold you responsible for the man’s life!”

“You dare call me a rascal?” blusters the youth, terror-stricken at finding how much Tom knows.

“I am a member of the College of Surgeons,” says Tom, recovering his coolness, “and have just been dining with Mr. Armsworth.  I suppose you know him?”

The assistant shook in his shoes at the name of that terrible justice of the peace and of the war also; and meekly and contritely he replied,—­

“Oh sir, what shall I do?”

“You’re in a very neat scrape; you could not have feathered your nest better,” says Tom, quietly filling his pipe, and thinking.  “As you behave now, I will get you out of it, or leave you to—­you know what, as well as I. Get your hat.”

He went out, and the youth followed trembling, while Tom formed his plans in his mind.

“The wild beast goes home to his lair to die, and so may he; for I fear it’s life and death now.  I’ll try the house where he was born.  Somewhere in Water Lane it is I know.”

And toward Water Lane he hurried.  It was a low-lying offshoot of the town, leading along the water meadows, with a straggling row of houses on each side, the perennial haunts of fever and ague.  Before them, on each side the road, and fringed with pollard willows and tall poplars, ran a tiny branch of the Whit, to feed some mill below; and spread out, meanwhile, into ponds and mires full of offal and duckweed and rank floating grass.  A thick mist hung knee-deep over them, and over the gardens right and left; and as Tom came down on the lane from the main street above, he could see the mist spreading across the water-meadows and reflecting the moon-beams like a lake; and as he walked into it, he felt as if he were walking down a well.  And he hurried down the lane, looking out anxiously ahead for the long cloak.

At last he came to a better sort of house.  That might be it.  He would take the chance.  There was a man of the middle class, and two or three women, standing at the gate.  He went up—­