Flower, left to himself, rolled exultingly on his poor couch, and for the first time in a fortnight breathed freely. “If I do get into trouble,” he murmured, complacently, “I generally manage to get out of it. It wants a good head in the first place, and a cool one in the second.” CHAPTER XVI. He was awake early in the morning, and, opening the door, stood delightedly breathing the fresh, pine-scented air. The atmosphere of the Blue Posts was already half forgotten, and he stood looking dreamily forward to the time when he might reasonably return to life and Poppy. He took a few steps into the wood and, after feeling for his pipe before he remembered that Miss Tipping was probably keeping it as a souvenir, sat on a freshly-cut log and fell into a sentimental reverie, until the appearance of a restless old man at the door of the cottage took him back to breakfast. “I thought you’d run off,” said his host, tartly. “You thought wrong, then,” said Flower, sharply, as he took out his purse. “Here are two of the five pounds I promised you; I’ll give you the rest when I go.” The old man took the money and closed his small, hard mouth until the lips almost disappeared. “More money than sense,” he remarked, cordially, as the skipper replaced his purse. Flower made no reply. Some slices of fat bacon were sizzling in a pan over the wood-fire, and the pungent smell of the woods, mixed with the sharpness of the morning air, gave him an appetite to which, since his enforced idleness, he had been a stranger. He drew his chair up to the rickety little table with its covering of frayed oil-cloth, and, breaking a couple of eggs over his bacon, set to eagerly. “Don’t get eggs like these in London,” he said to the old woman. The old woman leaned over and, inspecting the shells, paid a tribute to the hens who were responsible for them, and traced back a genealogy which would have baffled the entire College of Heralds—a genealogy hotly contested by the old man, who claimed a bar sinister through three eggs bought at the village shop some generations before. “You’ve got a nice little place here,” said Flower, by way of changing the conversation, which was well on the way to becoming personal; “but don’t you find it rather dull sometimes?” “Well, I don’t know,” said the old woman. “I finds plenty to do, and ’e potters about like. ’E don’t do much, but it pleases ’im, and it don’t hurt me.” The object of these compliments took them as a matter of course, and after hunting up the stump of last night’s cigar, and shredding it with his knife, crammed it into a clay pipe and smoked tranquilly. Flower found a solitary cigar, one of the Blue Posts’ best, and with a gaze which wandered idly from the chest of drawers on one side of the room to the old china dogs on the little mantel-shelf on the other, smoked in silence.