"Six miles away," was the sharp reply. "I'm a sucker--medical stoo," he added; and pulling off his coat, he rapidly rolled it into a pad for a pillow before proceeding in a business-like way to examine the fallen man's injuries. "I say, this is bad--arm broken--hip joint out--hold still, old fellow, I won't hurt you," he said, as his patient moaned. "You'd better go for help. I'll stay. Leave me that flask; and, I say, just see if my fishing tackle's all right: I left it up at the top." Then, as if inspired by the words uttered by the injured man a few minutes before, he exclaimed: "I say, I don't know that I ought to let you go; is this manslaughter or murder?" "No," moaned Millet, unclosing his eyes, and speaking in a hoarse whisper--"my old friend--an accident--sir--an accident." "I say, the brandy, man, the brandy," cried the new-comer. "By Jove he's fainted." "He's dead--he's dead," groaned Huish frantically, as he sank upon his knees and caught his friend's hand. "Rob, old fellow, I'd give my life that this had not happened; but I'll keep my word; I'll keep my word." Prologue--Chapter III. FOSTER-PARENTS. As Jane Glyne said, just four miles away from The Dingle was a low, long range of hovels, roughly built in the coarsest manner, and so covered in that but for a stuffing of straw here and there, the bleak winds and rain that come even in summer could beat through with all their force. The hovels were built on the unity principle--one room--one door--one chimney--one window, and they stood in a row close by the bank of a canal which formed the great highway to and from the dirty Goshen of these modern children of Israel. But they were not Jews, any more than they were Christians: they were simply work-people--the slaves who make bricks without straw, and not for the use of a king of Egypt, but for modern Babylon. The canal was the great highway to this settlement, which stood in an earth-gnawed desert of its own; but all the same there was a rugged pathway which led towards the pretty stream on whose bank stood Mrs Riversley's cottage, passable in fine weather, a slough in wet; and there was a roadway for carts, a horribly churned up mingling of mud and water, along which chariot wheels drave heavily to work woe upon that patient martyr of ours--the horse. It was not a pleasant spot that brickfield, and seemed to have been thrust out far from the habitations of ordinary men. It was not salubrious, but then its subsoil was of the stiffest clay. Here the brickmakers lived gregariously, each hovel containing as many as it would hold. Here four or five men `pigged' together. It was their own term, and most appropriate. In another hovel, a young couple would have three young men lodgers, while the occupants of other dens would have done the same, only that their swarming children did not give room for lodgers to lie down, the superficies of the floors being small.