At this point Jack lowered his voice to a whisper and looked timorously towards the door.

‘You know what he meant, Bob?’

Bob nodded and became reflective.

‘Well, I didn’t say nothing.’ pursued Bartley, ’but the chap stuck to me.  “A fair price for a fair article,” he says.  “You’ll always find me there of a Thursday night, if you’ve got any business going.  Give me a look round,” he says.  “It ain’t in my line,” I says.  So he gave a grin like, and kep’ on talking.  “If you want a four-half shiner,” he says, “you know where to come.  Reasonable with them as is reasonable.  Thursday night,” he says, and then he slung his hook round the corner.’

‘What’s a four-half shiner?’ inquired Bob, looking from under his eyebrows.

’Well, I didn’t know myself, just then:  but I’ve found out.  It’s a public-house pewter—­see?’

A flash of intelligence shot across Bob’s face.

When Pennyloaf returned she found her husband with his box of moulds and medals on the table.  He was turning over its contents, meditatively.  On the table there also lay a half crown and a florin, as though Bob had been examining these products of the Royal Mint with a view to improving the artistic quality of his amateur workmanship.  He took up the coins quietly as his wife entered and put them in his pocket.

‘Mrs. Rendal’s been at me again, Bob,’ Pennyloaf said, as she set down her market-basket.  ‘You’ll have to give her something to-day.’

He paid no attention, and Pennyloaf had a difficulty in bringing him to discuss the subject of the landlady’s demands.  Ultimately. however, he admitted with discontent the advisability of letting Mrs. Rendal have something on account.  Though it was Saturday night, he let hour after hour go by and showed no disposition to leave home; to Pennyloaf’s surprise, he sat almost without moving by the fire, absorbed in thought.

Genuine respect for law is the result of possessing something which the law exerts itself to guard.  Should it happen that you possess nothing. and that your education in metaphysics has been grievously neglected, the strong probability is, that your mind will reduce the principle of society to its naked formula:  Get, by whatever means, so long as with impunity.  On that formula Bob Hewett was brooding; in the hours of this Saturday evening he exerted his mind more strenuously than ever before in the course of his life.  And to a foregone result.  Here is a man with no moral convictions, with no conscious relations to society save those which are hostile, with no personal affections; at the same time, vaguely aware of certain faculties in himself for which life affords no scope and encouraged in various kinds of conceit by the crass stupidity of all with whom he associates.  It is suggested to him all at once that there is a very easy way of improving his circumstances, and that by exercise of a certain craft with which