Miss Jamieson laid aside a little sewing she was engaged on.

“Look here, young man, you don’t come bullying and threatening here.  I’ll have to call the policeman if you do....  I was at the railway station last Friday week, you know.”

Frank stood still for one furious instant.  Then his heart sank and he went out without a word.

* * * * *

The letters got written at last, late that evening, in the back room of a small lodging-house where he had secured a bed.  I have the one he wrote to Jack before me as I write, and I copy it as it stands.  It was without address or date.

     “DEAR JACK,

“I want you to do, something for me.  I want you to go to Merefield and see, first, Jenny, and then my father; and tell them quite plainly and simply that I’ve been in prison for a fortnight.  I want Jenny to know first, so that she can think of what to say to my father.  The thing I was sent to prison for was that I pleaded guilty to stealing a tin of salmon from a child called Mary Cooper.  You can see the account of the case in the County Gazette for last Saturday week, the twenty-seventh.  The thing I really did was to take the tin from somebody else I was traveling with.  He asked me to.

“Next, I want you to send on any letters that may have come for me to the address I enclose on a separate piece of paper.  Please destroy the address at once; but you can show this letter to Jenny and give her my love.  You are not to come and see me.  If you don’t, I’ll come and see you soon.

     “Things are pretty bad just now, but I’m going to go through
     with it.

     “Yours,

     “F.

     “P.S.—­By the way, please address me as Mr. F. Gregory when you
     write.”

* * * * *

He was perfectly obstinate, you understand, still.

* * * * *

Frank’s troubles as regards prison were by no means exhausted by his distressing conversation with the young ladies in the post office, and the next one fell on him as he was leaving the little town early on the Saturday morning.

He had just turned out of the main street and was going up a quiet side lane that looked as if it would lead to the York Road, when he noticed a disagreeable little scene proceeding up a narrow cul-de-sac across whose mouth he was passing.

A tall, loose-limbed young man, in his working-clothes, obviously slightly excited with drink, had hold of a miserable old man by the scruff of the neck with one hand, and was cuffing him with the other.

Now I do not wish to represent Frank as a sort of knight-errant, but the fact is that if anyone with respectable and humane ideas goes on the tramp (I have this from the mouth of experienced persons) he has to make up his mind fairly soon either to be a redresser of wrongs or to be conveniently short-sighted.  Frank was not yet sufficiently experienced to have learned the wisdom of the second alternative.