Now, the window of Uncle James’s little room was a little window that lived modestly between the double pillars of the portico and the first window of the great dining-room.  Resting from his labours of sorting and placing, he gazed forth at his domain, and mechanically calculated what profit would accrue to him if he cut off a slip a hundred and fifty feet deep along by the Oldcastle-road, and sold it in lots for villas, or built villas and sold them on ninety-nine-year leases.  He was engaged in his happy exercise of mental arithmetic when he heard footsteps crunching the gravel, and then a figure, which had evidently come round by the north side from the back of the Hall, passed across the field of James’s vision.  This figure was a walking baptism to the ground it trod.  It dripped water plenteously.  It was, in a word, soaked, and its garments clung to it.  Its yellow chamois gloves clung to its hands.  It had no hat.  It hesitated in front of the entrance.

Uncle James pushed up his window.  “What’s amiss, lad?” he inquired, with a certain blandness of satisfaction.

“I fell into the Water,” said Emanuel, feebly, meaning the sheet known as Wilbraham Water, which diversified the park-like splendours of Wilbraham Hall.

“How didst manage that?”

“The path is very muddy and slippery just there,” said Emanuel.

“Hadn’t you better run home as quick as may be?” James suggested.

“I can’t,” said Emanuel.

“Why not?”

“I’ve got no hat, and I’m all wet.  And everybody in Oldcastle-road will see me.  Can you lend me a hat and coat?”

And all the while he was steadily baptising the gravel.

Uncle James’s head disappeared for a moment, and then he threw out of the window a stiff yellow mackintosh of great age.  It was his rent-collecting mackintosh.  It had the excellent quality of matching the chamois gloves.

Emanuel thankfully took it.  “And what about a cap or something?” he plaintively asked.

“Tak’ this,” said Uncle James, with remarkable generosity whipping the Turkish cap from his own head, and handing it to Emanuel.

Emanuel hesitated, then accepted; and, thus uniquely attired, sped away, still baptising.

At tea (tea proper) James recounted this episode to a somewhat taciturn and preoccupied Helen.

“He didn’t fall into the Water,” said Helen, curtly.  “Andrew Dean pushed him in.”

“How dost know that?”

“Georgiana and I saw it from my bedroom window.  It was she who first saw them fighting, or at any rate arguing.  Then Andrew Dean ‘charged’ him in, as if they were playing football, and walked on; and Emanuel Prockter scrambled out.”

“H’m!” reflected James.  “Well, if ye ask me, lass, Emanuel brought that on himsen.  I never seed a man look a bigger foo’ than Emanuel looked when he went off in my mackintosh and Turkish cap.”

“Your Turkish cap?”