You see, a respectable man can do a deal of mischief; more than a rogue could.

A shrug of the shoulders from Meadows had caused the landlord to distrain.

A hint from Meadows had caused Merton to affront George about Susan.

A tone of Meadows had closed the bank cash-box to the Fieldings’ bill of exchange, and so on.  And now, finding it almost impossible to contain his exultation—­for George once in Australia he felt he could soon vanquish Susan’s faint preference, the result of habit—­he turned off, and went to meet his mare at the gate; the boy had just returned with her.

He put his foot in the stirrup, but ere he mounted it occurred to him to ask one of the farm servants whether the old Jew was gone.

“I sin him in the barn just now,” was the reply.

Meadows took his foot out of the stirrup.  Never leave an enemy behind you, was one of his rules.  “And why does the old heathen stay?” Meadows asked himself; he clinched his teeth and vowed he would not leave the village till George Fielding was on his way to Australia.

He sent his mare to the “Black Horse,” and strolled up the village; then he showed the boy a shilling and said, “You be sure and run to the public-house and let me know when George Fielding is going to start—­I should like to see the last of him.”

This was true!

CHAPTER III.

AND now passed over “The Grove” the heaviest hours it had ever known; hours as weary as they were bitter to George Fielding.  “The Grove” was nothing to him now—­in mind he was already separated from it; his clothes were ready, he had nothing more to do, and he wished he could fling himself this moment into the ship and hide his head, and sleep and forget his grief, until he reached the land whose fat and endless pastures were to make him rich and send him home a fitter match for Susan.

As the moment for parting drew nearer there came to him that tardy consolation which often comes to the honest man then when it can but add to his pangs of regret.

Perhaps no man is good, manly, tender, generous, honest and unlucky quite in vain; at last, when such a man is leaving all who have been unjust or cold to him, scales fall from their eyes, a sense of his value flashes like lightning across their half-empty skulls and tepid hearts, they feel and express some respect and regret, and make him sadder to leave them; so did the neighbors of “The Grove” to young Fielding.  Some hands gave him now their first warm pressure, and one or two voices even faltered as they said “God bless thee, lad!”

And now the carter’s lad ran in with a message from a farmer at the top of the hill.

“Oh!  Master George, Farmer Dodd says, if you please, he couldn’t think to let you walk.  You are to go in his gig to Newbury, if you’ll walk up as fur as his farm; he’s afeared to come down our hill, a says, because if he did, his mare ’ud kick his gig into toothpicks, he says.  Oh!  Master George, I be sorry you be going,” and the boy, who had begun quite cheerfully, ended in a whimper.