“There, the gig is ready,” cried Mr. Jacobs; “you come along,” and the ex-thief pushed the thief hastily off the premises and drove him away with speed.

George Fielding gave a bitter sigh.  This was a fresh mortification.  He had for the last two months been defending Robinson against the surmises of the village.

Villages are always concluding there is something wrong about people.

“What does he do?” inquired our village.

“Where does he get his blue coat with brass buttons, his tartan waistcoat and green satin tie with red ends?  We admit all this looks like a gentleman.  But yet, somehow, a gentleman is a horse of another color than this Robinson.”

George had sometimes laughed at all this, sometimes been very angry, and always stood up stoutly for his friend and lodger.

And now the fools were right and he was wrong.  His friend and protege was handcuffed before his eyes and carried off to the county jail amid the grins and stares of a score of gaping rustics, who would make a fine story of it this evening in both public-houses; and a hundred voices would echo some such conversational Tristich as this: 

1st Rustic.  “I tawld un as much, dinn’t I now, Jarge?”

2d Rustic.  “That ye did, Richard, for I heerd ee.”

1st Rustic.  “But, la! bless ye, he don’t vally advice, he don’t.”

George Fielding groaned out, “I’m ready to go now—­I’m quite ready to go—­I am leaving a nest of insults;” and he darted into the house, as much to escape the people’s eyes as to finish his slight preparations for so great a journey.

Two men were left alone; sulky William and respectable Meadows.  Both these men’s eyes followed George into the house, and each had a strong emotion they were bent on concealing, and did conceal from each other; but was it concealed from all the world?

The farm-house had two rooms looking upon the spot where most of our tale has passed.

The smaller one of these was a little state parlor, seldom used by the family.  Here on a table was a grand old folio Bible; the names, births, and deaths of a century of Fieldings appeared in rusty ink and various handwritings upon its fly-leaf.

Framed on the walls were the first savage attempts of woman at worsted-work in these islands.  There were two moral commonplaces, and there was the forbidden fruit-tree, whose branches diverged, at set distances like the radii of a circle, from its stem, a perpendicular line; exactly at the end of each branch hung one forbidden fruit—­pre-Raphaelite worsted-work.

There were also two prints of more modern date, one agricultural, one manufactural.

No. 1 was a great show of farming implements at Doncaster.

No. 2 showed how, one day in the history of man and of mutton, a sheep was sheared, her wool washed, teased, carded, etc., and the cloth ’d and ’d and ’d and ’d, and a coat shaped and sewed and buttoned upon a goose, whose preparations for inebriating the performers and spectators of his feat appeared in a prominent part of the picture.