’I hope to be able to make that little bill-business right with you in the course of three weeks, Mr. Barnet,’ said Charlson with hail-fellow friendliness.

Barnet replied good-naturedly that there was no hurry.

This particular three weeks had moved on in advance of Charlson’s present with the precision of a shadow for some considerable time.

‘I’ve had a dream,’ Charlson continued.  Barnet knew from his tone that the surgeon was going to begin his characteristic nonsense, and did not encourage him.  ‘I’ve had a dream,’ repeated Charlson, who required no encouragement.  ’I dreamed that a gentleman, who has been very kind to me, married a haughty lady in haste, before he had quite forgotten a nice little girl he knew before, and that one wet evening, like the present, as I was walking up the harbour-road, I saw him come out of that dear little girl’s present abode.’

Barnet glanced towards the speaker.  The rays from a neighbouring lamp struck through the drizzle under Charlson’s umbrella, so as just to illumine his face against the shade behind, and show that his eye was turned up under the outer corner of its lid, whence it leered with impish jocoseness as he thrust his tongue into his cheek.

‘Come,’ said Barnet gravely, ‘we’ll have no more of that.’

‘No, no—­of course not,’ Charlson hastily answered, seeing that his humour had carried him too far, as it had done many times before.  He was profuse in his apologies, but Barnet did not reply.  Of one thing he was certain—­that scandal was a plant of quick root, and that he was bound to obey Lucy’s injunction for Lucy’s own sake.

CHAPTER III

He did so, to the letter; and though, as the crocus followed the snowdrop and the daffodil the crocus in Lucy’s garden, the harbour-road was a not unpleasant place to walk in, Barnet’s feet never trod its stones, much less approached her door.  He avoided a saunter that way as he would have avoided a dangerous dram, and took his airings a long distance northward, among severely square and brown ploughed fields, where no other townsman came.  Sometimes he went round by the lower lanes of the borough, where the rope-walks stretched in which his family formerly had share, and looked at the rope-makers walking backwards, overhung by apple-trees and bushes, and intruded on by cows and calves, as if trade had established itself there at considerable inconvenience to Nature.

One morning, when the sun was so warm as to raise a steam from the south-eastern slopes of those flanking hills that looked so lovely above the old roofs, but made every low-chimneyed house in the town as smoky as Tophet, Barnet glanced from the windows of the town-council room for lack of interest in what was proceeding within.  Several members of the corporation were present, but there was not much business doing, and in a few minutes Downe came leisurely across to him, saying that he seldom saw Barnet now.