“Come as far as the post-office,” said Lord Newhaven.

Dick gathered himself together, and rose slowly to his large feet.

“You millionaires are all the same,” he said.  “Because you have a house crawling with servants till they stick to the ceiling you have to go to the post-office to buy a penny stamp.  It’s like keeping a dog and barking yourself.”

“I don’t fancy I bark much,” said Lord Newhaven.

“No, and you don’t bite often, but when you do you take out the piece.  Do you remember that colored chap at Broken Hill?”

“He deserved it,” said Lord Newhaven.

“He richly deserved it.  But you took him in, poor devil, all the same.  You were so uncommonly mild and limp beforehand, and letting pass things you ought not to have let pass, that, like the low beast he was, he thought he could play you any dog’s trick, and that you would never turn on him.”

“It’s a way worms have.”

“Oh, hang worms; it does not matter whether they turn or not.  But cobras have no business to imitate them till poor rookies think they have no poison in them, and that they can tickle them with a switch.  What a great hulking brute that man was!  You ricked him when you threw him!  I saw him just before I left Adelaide.  He’s been lame ever since.”

“He’d have done for me if he could.”

“Of course he would.  His blood was up.  He meant to break your back.  I saw him break a chap’s back once, and it did not take so very long either.  I heard it snap.  But why did you let him go so far to start with before you pulled him up?  That’s what I’ve never been able to understand about you.  If you behaved different to start with they would behave different to you.  They would know they’d have to.”

“I have not your art,” said Lord Newhaven, tranquilly, “of letting a man know when he’s getting out of hand that unless he goes steady there will be a row, and he’ll be in it.  I’m not made like that.”

“It works well,” said Dick.  “It’s a sort of peaceful way of rubbing along and keeping friends.  If you let those poor bullies know what to expect they aren’t, as a rule, over-anxious to toe the mark.  But you never do let them know.”

“No,” said Lord Newhaven, as he shot his letter into the brass mouth in the cottage wall, just below a window of “bulls’-eyes” and peppermints, “I never do.  I don’t defend it.  But—­”

“But what?”

Lord Newhaven’s face underwent some subtle change.  His eyes fixed themselves on a bottle of heart-shaped peppermints, and then met Dick’s suddenly, with the clear, frank glance of a schoolboy.

“But somehow, for the life of me, until things get serious—­I can’t.”

Dick, whose perceptions were rather of a colossal than an acute order, nevertheless perceived that he had received a confidence, and changed the subject.

“Aren’t you going to buy some stamps?” he asked, perfectly aware that Lord Newhaven had had his reasons for walking to the post-office.