Darcy Faircloth lighted down out of a ramshackle Marychurch station fly, and advanced towards the rather incomprehensible group.

“What’s happened?  What’s the matter?” he said.  “What on earth do you want with those two youngsters?”

“I want to convey them to the proper authorities,” Sawyer answered, with all the self-importance he could muster.  He found his interlocutor’s somewhat abrupt and lordly manner at once annoying and impressive, as were his commanding height and rather ruffling gait.  “These boys have been engaged in robbing a garden.  I caught them in the act, and it is my duty to see that they pay the penalty of their breach of the law.  I count on your assistance in taking them to the police-station.”

“You want to give them in charge?”

“What else?—­The moral tone of this parish is, I grieve to say, very low.”

Sawyer talked loud and fast in the effort to assert himself.

“Low and coarse,” he repeated.  “Both as a warning to others, and in the interests of their own future, an example must be made of these two lads.”

“Must it?” Faircloth said, towering above him in the pale bewildering mist.

The little boys, who had remained curiously and rather dangerously still since the advent of this stranger, now strained together, signalling, whispering.  Sawyer shook them impatiently apart.

“Steady there, please,” Faircloth put in sharply.  “It strikes me you take a good deal upon yourself.  May I ask who you are?”

“I am the assistant priest,” Reginald began.  But his explanation was cut short by piping voices.

“It’s Cap’en Darcy, that’s who it is.  We never meant no ’arm, Cap’en.  That we didn’t.  The apples was rotting on the ground, s’h’lp me if they wasn’t.  Grannie Staples was took to the Union last Wednesday fortnight, and anyone’s got the run of her garden since.  Don’t you let the new parson get us put away, Cap’en.  We belongs to the Island—­I’m William Jennifer’s Tommy, please Cap’en, and ’e’s Bobby Sclanders ’e is.”

And being cunning, alike by nature and stress of circumstance, they pathetically drooped, blubbering in chorus: 

“We never didn’t mean no ’arm, Cap’en.  Strike me dead if we did.”

At which last implied profanity Reginald Sawyer shuddered, loosening his grasp.

Of what followed he could subsequently give no definite account.  The dignities of his sacred profession and his self-respect alike reeled ignominiously into chaos.  He believed he heard the person, addressed as Captain Darcy, say quietly: 

“Cut it, youngsters.  Now’s your chance.”

He felt that both the children violently struggled, and that the round hard head of one of them butted him in the stomach.  He divined that sounds of ribald laughter, in the distance, proceeded from the driver of the Marychurch station fly.  He knew two small figures raced whooping down the lane attended by squelchings of mud and clatter of heavy soled boots.