‘But that’s just what you’ve swore not to do,’ says she.  ’She’ll never forgive me if you do, Tom; and what need of asking when for the trouble of walking the length of the road you can see them together?  But if I tell you where to find them, you swear you won’t speak or make a fuss, because she’d know I’d told you?’

‘I swear I won’t,’ says I.

‘Well, then,’ says Amelia, ’I don’t seem to be acting fair to her; but, take it the other way, I can’t abear to stand by and see you deceived, Tom.  If you go by the churchyard an hour from now, you’ll see them in the porch; but don’t you say a word to them, and never say I told you.  Now, be off, Tom,’ says she.

It was early summer by this time, and the evenings long.  I don’t think any man need envy me what I felt as I walked about the lanes waiting till it was time to walk up to the church and find out for certain that I’d been made a fool of.

It was dusk when I opened the churchyard gate and walked up the path.

There she was, sure enough, in her Sunday muslin with the violet sprig, and her black silk jacket with the bugles, and her arm was round Joe Wheeler’s neck—­confound him!—­and his arms were round her waist, both of them.  They didn’t see me, and I stood for a minute and looked at them, and but for what I’d swore to Amelia I believe I should have taken Wheeler by the throat and shaken the life out of him then and there.  But I had swore, and I turned sharp and walked away, and I never went up to Teesdale’s nor to my father’s farm, but I went straight back to Pound’s, the man I was bound to, and I wrote a letter to Jenny and one to Amelia, and in Amelia’s I only said—­

’Dear Amelia,—­Thank you very much; you were quite right.

Tom.’

And in the other I said—­

Jenny, I’ve had pretty well enough of you; you can go to the devil your own way.  So no more at present from your sincere well-wisher Tom.

‘P.S.—­I’m going for a soldier.’

And I left everything:  my master that I was bound to, and my trade and my father.  And I went straight off to London.  And I should have been a soldier right enough but that I fell in with a fireman, and he persuaded me to go in for that business, which is just as exciting as a soldier’s, and a great deal more dangerous, most times.  And a fireman I was for six or eight years, but I never cared to walk out with another girl when I thought of Jenny.  I didn’t tell my folks where I’d gone, and for years I heard nothing from them.

And one night there was a fire in a street off the Borough—­a high house it was,—­and I went up the ladder to a window where there was a woman screaming, and directly I see her face I see it was Jenny.

I fetched her down the ladder right enough, and she clung round my neck (she didn’t know me from Adam), and said:  ’Oh, go back and fetch my husband.’  And I knew it was Wheeler I’d got to go and find.