Then we left.  The village looked very pretty in the late light—­pretty and tuneful as a nest of nightingales.

‘You’ll turn up on Monday, I hope,’ said Woodhouse, when we reached town.  That was his only allusion to the affair.

So we turned up—­through a world still singing that the Earth was flat—­at the little clay-coloured market-town with the large Corn Exchange and the small Jubilee memorial.  We had some difficulty in getting seats in the court.  Woodhouse’s imported London lawyer was a man of commanding personality, with a voice trained to convey blasting imputations by tone.  When the case was called, he rose and stated his client’s intention not to proceed with the charge.  His client, he went on to say, had not entertained, and, of course, in the circumstances could not have entertained, any suggestion of accepting on behalf of public charities any moneys that might have been offered to him on the part of Sir Thomas’s estate.  At the same time, no one acknowledged more sincerely than his client the spirit in which those offers had been made by those entitled to make them.  But, as a matter of fact—­here he became the man of the world colloguing with his equals—­certain—­er—­details had come to his client’s knowledge since the lamentable outburst, which ...  He shrugged his shoulders.  Nothing was served by going into them, but he ventured to say that, had those painful circumstances only been known earlier, his client would—­again ’of course’—­never have dreamed—­A gesture concluded the sentence, and the ensnared Bench looked at Sir Thomas with new and withdrawing eyes.  Frankly, as they could see, it would be nothing less than cruelty to proceed further with this—­er-unfortunate affair.  He asked leave, therefore, to withdraw the charge in toto, and at the same time to express his client’s deepest sympathy with all who had been in any way distressed, as his client had been, by the fact and the publicity of proceedings which he could, of course, again assure them that his client would never have dreamed of instituting if, as he hoped he had made plain, certain facts had been before his client at the time when....  But he had said enough.  For his fee it seemed to me that he had.

Heaven inspired Sir Thomas’s lawyer—­all of a sweat lest his client’s language should come out—­to rise up and thank him.  Then, Sir Thomas—­not yet aware what leprosy had been laid upon him, but grateful to escape on any terms—­followed suit.  He was heard in interested silence, and people drew back a pace as Gehazi passed forth.

‘You hit hard,’ said Bat to Woodhouse afterwards.  ’His own people think he’s mad.’

’You don’t say so?  I’ll show you some of his letters to-night at dinner,’ he replied.

He brought them to the Red Amber Room of the Chop Suey.  We forgot to be amazed, as till then we had been amazed, over the Song or ‘The Gubby,’ or the full tide of Fate that seemed to run only for our sakes.  It did not even interest Ollyett that the verb ‘to huckle’ had passed into the English leader-writers’ language.  We were studying the interior of a soul, flash-lighted to its grimiest corners by the dread of ’losing its position.’