Gradually her master’s face cleared itself and softened. “Perhaps,” he muttered, “perhaps no other fellow after all, but—who knows?—a baby’s tender little mouth may do it.” CHAPTER XX. WHEN Strange got back to town, after baiting man and beast at a little inn on the outskirts of Weybridge, Tolly’s greeting, which was blasphemous and amazed, and the unusual look in his green eyes, caused his master to glance at himself in the glass. “Heaven!” he thought, turning away, “I’m a nice object to go courting! One would think I had just emerged from D.T., or Bedlam! Tolly, turn on the hot water, empty a bottle of vinegar into it, and put out clean clothes for me. I feel like jelly. Good Lord! has love this limping effect often?” He turned into his bedroom. As he was wrestling with one of his shirt buttons he muttered, “However this goes, it’s a toss-up what the gain will be, heaven or hell. Well, a man might do worse than face hell for her.” He had hardly made this heroic remark when the absurdity of it struck him; he laughed aloud. “I had better face my bath,” he said. When he was washed and dressed, he rather thought of the Club and a good lunch, but the game didn’t seem worth the candle. He felt that his hands were quite sufficiently full with one woman, he had no desire for men, more especially at feeding-time. “I shall have my lunch here,” he said, looking up from his paper, “get out some bread and cheese, and beer, and anything else you can lay your hands on.” In five minutes Tolly had covered a little round table with a cloth, and had set out on it a mixed assortment of cheese, beer, jam, and a freshly-opened tin of _foie gras_, and he stood proudly in attendance with napkin on arm, keeping down with difficulty a grin of self-satisfaction. However full he was of himself, Strange never let a new accomplishment of Tolly’s escape him, if he did, the effect on the boy would have been disastrous. No sinner ever strove after God as this sinner after his owner. “Well done, Tolly, you’ll shine in life yet, the way you flourish that damask is sublime!” “Beggin’ your pardon, your wussup,” said Tolly, “Bill, the groom, ’e were round after ye, a-stormin’ at me because the horse was out. Bill always lets out at me like when he feels hisself put about in his mind, and he thought you and the beast were lost,” sniggered Tolly. “I told him you was big enough to take care of yourself, and that gents often finds the nights more convenienter than the days,” he remarked confidentially, pushing the salt under his master’s nose. “Bill is that ignorant, sir, of loife and sich, he erstonishes me.” Strange drank his beer with a look at the half-made creature who had plumbed ‘loife’ from the vantage ground of her sewers. “Very like his betters,” he thought, “we get lots of our views from a vantage ground not one whit sweeter or cleaner than Tolly’s.”