Thus, though always on the edge of poverty, he had managed his affairs—­until four years ago, when the trouble began with his leg.

At first he paid little heed to it, since it gave him no pain and little more than a passing discomfort.  It started, in fact, as a small hard cyst low down at the back of the right thigh, incommoding him when he bent his knee.  He called it “a nut in the flesh,” and tried once or twice to get rid of it by squeezing it between fingers and thumb.  It did not yield to this treatment.

He could not fix, within a month or so, the date when it began to hurt him.  But it had been hurting him, off and on, for some weeks, when one night, tacking out towards the fishing-grounds against a stiffish southerly breeze, as he ran forward to tend the fore-sheet his leg gave way under him as if it had been stabbed, and he rolled into the scuppers in intolerable anguish.  For a week after this Nicky-Nan nursed himself ashore, and it was given out that he had twisted his knee-cap.  He did not call in a doctor, although the swelling took on a red and angry hue.  As a fact, no medical man now resided within three miles of Polpier. (When asked how they did without one, the inhabitants answered gravely that during the summer season, when the visitors were about, Dr Mant came over twice a-week from St Martin’s; in the winter they just died a natural death.)

At any rate Nicky-Nan, because he was poor, would not call in a doctor; and, because he was proud, would not own to anything worse than a twisted knee, even when his neighbours on the Quay, putting their heads together, had shaken them collectively and decided that “the poor man must be suff’rin’ from something chronic.”

Then followed a bitter time, as his savings dwindled.  He made more than a dozen brave attempts to resume his old occupation.  But in the smallest lop of a sea he was useless, so that it became dangerous to take him.  Month by month he fell further back in arrears of rent.

And now the end seemed to have arrived with Mr Pamphlett’s notice of ejectment.  Nicky-Nan, of course, held that Mr Pamphlett had a personal grudge against him.  Mr Pamphlett had nothing of the sort.  In ordinary circumstances, knowing Nicky-Nan to be an honest man, he would have treated him easily.  But he wanted to “develope” Polpier to his own advantage:  and his scheme of development centred on the old house by the bridge.  He desired to pull it down and transfer the Bank to that eligible site.  He had a plan of the proposed new building, with a fine stucco frontage and edgings of terra-cotta.

Mr Pamphlett saw his way to make this improvement, and was quite resolute about it; and Nicky-Nan, by his earlier reception of notices to quit, had not bettered any chance of resisting.  Still—­had Nicky-Nan known it—­Mr Pamphlett, like many another bank manager, had been caught and thrown in a heap by the sudden swoop of War.  Over the telephone wires he had been in agitated converse all day with his superiors, who had at length managed to explain to him the working of the financial Moratorium.