to which he sent his sons, or to insult a man so highly recommended to him as Mr. Crayshaw had been.  There certainly seemed to have been some severity, and the boys seemed to be a very rough lot; but Jem would fight, and if he gave he must take.  His great-grandfather was just the same, and he fought the Putney Pet when he was five-and-twenty, and his parents thought he was sitting quietly at his desk in Fetter Lane.

I loved Jem too well to be jealous of him, but I was not the less conscious of the tender tone in which my father always spoke even of his faults, and of the way it stiffened and cooled when he added that I was not so ready with my fists, but that I was as fond of my own way as Jem was of a fight; but that setting up for being unlike other people didn’t do for school life, and that the Woods had done me no kindness by making a fool of me.  He added, however, that he should request Mr. Crayshaw, as a personal favour, that I should receive no punishment for running away, as I had suffered sufficiently already.

We had told very little of the true history of Crayshaw’s before Jem fainted, and I felt no disposition to further confidences.  I took as cheerful a farewell of my mother as I could, for her sake; and put on a good deal of swagger and “don’t care” to console Jem.  He said, “You’re as plucky as Lorraine,” and then his eyes shut again.  He was too ill to think much, and I kissed his head and left him.  After which I got stoutly into the dog-cart, and we drove back up the dreary hills down which Jem and I had run away.

That Snuffy was bland to cringing before my father did not give me hope that I should escape his direst revenge; and the expression of Lorraine’s face showed me, by its sympathy, what he expected.  But we were both wrong, and for reasons which we then knew nothing about.

Cruelty was, as I have said, Mr. Crayshaw’s ruling passion, but it was not his only vice.  There was a whispered tradition that he had once been in jail for a misuse of his acquirements in the art of penmanship; and if you heard his name cropping up in the confidential conversation of such neighbours as small farmers, the postman, the parish overseer, and the like, it was sure to be linked with unpleasingly suggestive expressions, such as—­“a dirty bit of business,” “a nasty job that,” “an awkward affair,” “very near got into trouble,” “a bit of bother about it, but Driver and Quills pulled him through; theirs isn’t a nice business, and they’re men of t’ same feather as Crayshaw, so I reckon they’re friends.”  Many such hints have I heard, for the ‘White Lion’ was next door to the sweet-shop, and in summer, refreshment of a sober kind, with conversation to match, was apt to be enjoyed on the benches outside.  The good wives of the neighbourhood used no such euphuisms as their more prudent husbands, when they spoke of Crayshaw’s.  Indeed one of the whispered anecdotes of Snuffy’s past was of a hushed-up story that was just saved from becoming a scandal, but in reference to which Mr. Crayshaw was even more narrowly saved from a crowd of women who had taken the too-tardy law into their own hands.  I remember myself the retreat of an unpaid washer-woman from the back premises of Crayshaw’s on one occasion, and the unmistakable terms in which she expressed her opinions.