The three Finsburys mounted into their compartment, and fell immediately to quarrelling, a step unseemly in itself and (in this case) highly unfortunate for Morris.  Had he lingered a moment longer by the window, this tale need never have been written.  For he might then have observed (as the porters did not fail to do) the arrival of a second passenger in the uniform of Sir Faraday Bond.  But he had other matters on hand, which he judged (God knows how erroneously) to be more important.

‘I never heard of such a thing,’ he cried, resuming a discussion which had scarcely ceased all morning.  ‘The bill is not yours; it is mine.’

‘It is payable to me,’ returned the old gentleman, with an air of bitter obstinacy.  ‘I will do what I please with my own property.’

The bill was one for eight hundred pounds, which had been given him at breakfast to endorse, and which he had simply pocketed.

‘Hear him, Johnny!’ cried Morris.  ’His property! the very clothes upon his back belong to me.’

‘Let him alone,’ said John.  ‘I am sick of both of you.’

‘That is no way to speak of your uncle, sir,’ cried Joseph.  ’I will not endure this disrespect.  You are a pair of exceedingly forward, impudent, and ignorant young men, and I have quite made up my mind to put an end to the whole business.’.

‘O skittles!’ said the graceful John.

But Morris was not so easy in his mind.  This unusual act of insubordination had already troubled him; and these mutinous words now sounded ominously in his ears.  He looked at the old gentleman uneasily.  Upon one occasion, many years before, when Joseph was delivering a lecture, the audience had revolted in a body; finding their entertainer somewhat dry, they had taken the question of amusement into their own hands; and the lecturer (along with the board schoolmaster, the Baptist clergyman, and a working-man’s candidate, who made up his bodyguard) was ultimately driven from the scene.  Morris had not been present on that fatal day; if he had, he would have recognized a certain fighting glitter in his uncle’s eye, and a certain chewing movement of his lips, as old acquaintances.  But even to the inexpert these symptoms breathed of something dangerous.

‘Well, well,’ said Morris.  ’I have no wish to bother you further till we get to London.’

Joseph did not so much as look at him in answer; with tremulous hands he produced a copy of the British Mechanic, and ostentatiously buried himself in its perusal.

‘I wonder what can make him so cantankerous?’ reflected the nephew.  ’I don’t like the look of it at all.’  And he dubiously scratched his nose.

The train travelled forth into the world, bearing along with it the customary freight of obliterated voyagers, and along with these old Joseph, affecting immersion in his paper, and John slumbering over the columns of the Pink Un, and Morris revolving in his mind a dozen grudges, and suspicions, and alarms.  It passed Christchurch by the sea, Herne with its pinewoods, Ringwood on its mazy river.  A little behind time, but not much for the South-Western, it drew up at the platform of a station, in the midst of the New Forest, the real name of which (in case the railway company ‘might have the law of me’) I shall veil under the alias of Browndean.