“I can’t go on,” he was raving.  “I can’t go on.  Three hundred thousand, four hundred thousand!  The huge multitude!  Cheated!  All my life it may take me! ...  Patience!  Patience indeed! ...  Fool! fool!”

There was a noise of hobnails on the bricks in the bar, and Mrs. Hall had very reluctantly to leave the rest of his soliloquy.  When she returned the room was silent again, save for the faint crepitation of his chair and the occasional clink of a bottle.  It was all over; the stranger had resumed work.

When she took in his tea she saw broken glass in the corner of the room under the concave mirror, and a golden stain that had been carelessly wiped.  She called attention to it.

“Put it down in the bill,” snapped her visitor.  “For God’s sake don’t worry me.  If there’s damage done, put it down in the bill,” and he went on ticking a list in the exercise book before him.

“I’ll tell you something,” said Fearenside, mysteriously.  It was late in the afternoon, and they were in the little beer-shop of Iping Hanger.

“Well?” said Teddy Henfrey.

“This chap you’re speaking of, what my dog bit.  Well—­he’s black.  Leastways, his legs are.  I seed through the tear of his trousers and the tear of his glove.  You’d have expected a sort of pinky to show, wouldn’t you?  Well—­there wasn’t none.  Just blackness.  I tell you, he’s as black as my hat.”

“My sakes!” said Henfrey.  “It’s a rummy case altogether.  Why, his nose is as pink as paint!”

“That’s true,” said Fearenside.  “I knows that.  And I tell ’ee what I’m thinking.  That marn’s a piebald, Teddy.  Black here and white there—­in patches.  And he’s ashamed of it.  He’s a kind of half-breed, and the colour’s come off patchy instead of mixing.  I’ve heard of such things before.  And it’s the common way with horses, as any one can see.”

CHAPTER IV

MR. CUSS INTERVIEWS THE STRANGER

I have told the circumstances of the stranger’s arrival in Iping with a certain fulness of detail, in order that the curious impression he created may be understood by the reader.  But excepting two odd incidents, the circumstances of his stay until the extraordinary day of the club festival may be passed over very cursorily.  There were a number of skirmishes with Mrs. Hall on matters of domestic discipline, but in every case until late April, when the first signs of penury began, he over-rode her by the easy expedient of an extra payment.  Hall did not like him, and whenever he dared he talked of the advisability of getting rid of him; but he showed his dislike chiefly by concealing it ostentatiously, and avoiding his visitor as much as possible.  “Wait till the summer,” said Mrs. Hall sagely, “when the artisks are beginning to come.  Then we’ll see.  He may be a bit overbearing, but bills settled punctual is bills settled punctual, whatever you’d like to say.”