When, therefore, in late November Ned received a letter from the lawyer telling him to be at the High Courts of Justice in the Strand, London, at ten thirty in the morning on a certain day, prepared to give his evidence, a most peculiar change took place in that bullet-headed youth. His appetite abandoned him; sweat stood on his brow at moments unconnected with honest toil. He gave the girl Pansy black looks; and sat with his prepared evidence before him, wiping the palms of his hands stealthily on his breeches. That, which he had never really thought would spring, was upon him after all, and panic, such as nothing physical could have caused in him, tweaked his nerves and paralysed his brain. But for his father he would never have come up to the scratch. Born before the halfpenny Press, and unable to ride a bicycle, unthreatened moreover by the witness-box, Bowden--after a long pipe--gave out his opinion that it “widden never du to let that chap ’ave it all his own way. There wasn’t nothin’ to it if Ned kept a stiff upper lip. ’Twid be an ’oliday-like in London for them both.” So, dressed in their darkest and most board-like tweeds, with black bowler hats, they drove in to catch the London train, with a small boy bobbing on a board behind them to drive the mare back home. Deep within each was a resentful conviction that this came of women; and they gave no thought to the feelings of the girl who was plaintiff in the suit, or of the girl who watched them drive out of the yard. While the train swiftly bore them, stolid and red-faced, side by side, the feeling grew within them that to make a holiday of this would spite that chap Steer. He wanted to make them sweat; if they did not choose to sweat--it was one in the eye for him. They put up at an hotel with a Devonshire name in Covent Garden, and in the evening visited a music-hall where was a show called the ‘Rooshian ballet.’ They sat a little forward with their hands on their thighs, their ruddy faces, expressionless as waxworks, directed towards the stage, whereon ‘Les Sylphides’ were floating white and ethereal. When the leading danseuse was held upside down, Bowden’s mouth opened slightly. He was afterwards heard to say that she had ‘got some legs on her.’ Unable to obtain refreshment after the performance, owing to the war, they sought the large flasks in their bedroom, and slept, snoring soundly, as though to express even in their slumbers a contempt for the machinations of ‘that chap.’ VI